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Friday Flash Prompt: What To Do About Adjectives and Adverbs?

By Randall Brown | May 14, 2010 6:35 AM | 1 Comment
When I think of adverbs, I think of Saturday morning’s Schoolhouse Rock message:

Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, get your adverbs here.
Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, got some adverbs here.
Come on down to Lolly’s, get the adverbs here!
You’re going to need
If you write or read,
Or even think about it.

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How much has changed! “They” now say, if you’re going to write, you don’t need adverbs or adjectives. Well, that might be a bit of an overstatement. But adjectives & adverbs are something they say should be avoided, the logic being that weak nouns need adjectives and weak verbs need adverbs. Why say “slowly walked” when you could say sauntered? Write with strong verbs & nouns, and you won’t need to modify them.

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Friday’s Prompt gives you two options:

  1. Write a flash that contains no adjectives or adverbs.

  2. Write a flash that purposely fills the flash with adjectives and/or adverbs. Make the title “Modifiers.”

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Comments (1) Comments RSS

  • user-pic
    From Todd B Stevens reply
    posted on 14 May 2010, 9:04 PM

    I see an evolution of uses of these words. There was a time in which we carpet bombed adjectives and adverbs. We called it Victorian Literature. Great expenditure of effort for smaller effects. I consider my adverbs and adjectives laser targeted. I use them to destroy nouns without affecting the surrounding verbs and apparatus. But poetry is more about contrast than prose, even flash prose. I'll try both these prompts.

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