Aspiring science-fiction authors receive one piece of advice above all others: Forsake the adverb, the killer of prose. It’s terribly, awfully, horrendously important. But why? Really, adverbs aren’t ...

David John Moore Cornwell, better known by his pen name John Le Carre, passed away in December. The author of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” and “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold” leaves behind a ...

“Many older adults said they feel positively about their lives,” the New York Times reported recently. That sentence probably sounds as acceptable to you as it did to the Times editors. But what if ...

Adverbs are of different types. Among such are adverbs of manner (like smoothly, awkwardly and loudly) and those of time (today, yesterday and now). But there is a type not commonly taught: the one ...

Watch out! Thunder goats are dropping in! They use their magic hammers to make sentences filled with potential. As a team, use your knowledge of adverbs and adverbial phrases to describe verbs and ...

I am gladly, fully, openly in support of adverbs. Despite our democratic ideals, schoolchildren throughout America learn that not all words are created equal: Nouns and verbs make sense of the world, ...

When I first learned that fans of Taylor Swift called themselves Swifties, I smiled. I knew the word Swiftie in a completely different context. The source of my knowledge is not a glamorous global ...

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are,” said W. Somerset Maugham. That hasn’t prevented many writers (and non-writers, or Maugham himself) from ...

Our discussion of flat adverbs continues today as we, firstly, add more examples. I hope you remember what flat adverbs are: those that do not carry -ly. Rather, they have the same forms as adjectives ...