When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It
by Ben Yagoda
Broadway Books, HK$104
Adjectives: Martin Amis and Jonathan Raban are master users, but Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison loathe them. So did Mark Twain, whose advice Ben Yagoda borrows for the title of his book When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It. An English teacher at the University of Delaware who 'collects' unusual adjectives, he shows how writers can be effective by being resourceful in their word choices. Attributive adjectives, he says, are the most abused and likely to be cliched. 'Have you heard of a bystander who wasn't innocent, a lining that wasn't silver or a break that wasn't lucky?' he writes. Yagoda doesn't just bash the adjective. He also demonstrates how adverbs can add flab, including comments from people such as Elmore Leonard, who cautions against using them to modify the word 'said'. There are dissenters, among them J.K. Rowling, whose fetish for adverbs is evident in her Harry Potter novels. Yagoda's breadth of knowledge is impressive but in trying to make a must-read out of a book about parts of speech - including adverbs, articles, conjunctions and more - he sometimes tries too hard to be 'cool' (which, he says, is still an acceptable adjective, unlike 'groovy'). A 'should-read'.