The reason may be that they are taught, and students learn to use them – and then never stop using them.)

(For a more measured discussion, in the context of language learning and of academic English, see Paquot (2010). The sentence adverbs are wildly overused by many authors. Do they say anything different? Not really, because the first is not claiming that all blips are blops it is silent on that question. Compare “blips are blops” with “almost invariably blips are blops”. The hedges I forgive, after careful consideration, if the sentence would be untrue without them, but this does not happen as often as you might think. There are the – ly adverbs of manner which can be formed from almost any adjective ( smugly, intelligently, squashily), the very-high-frequency time adverbs ( soon, often, yesterday), and then a ragbag of hedges ( maybe, possibly, probably), emphasizers ( very, extremely, absolutely), sentence adverbs ( however, consequently, funnily (enough)) and extreme horrors like just and quite which, depending on many precise characteristics of context and placement, can mean anything from “very much” to “scarcely at all”, with many deviations in between. If I am going to be surprised or interested by something I read, it will be because I find the content surprising or interesting, not because the author has told me to.Īdverbs are the dustbin of English grammatical categories. Whenever I see “surprisingly” or “interestingly” I always think: surprising to whom? Interesting to whom? Perhaps it was surprising to the author because they didn’t have the intelligence to anticipate what they then found surprising. But, for now, let’s assume that the purpose of writing is communicating, not keeping your boss or teacher happy.) (Of course, you may have another problem if you were writing an assignment which needs to be, say, 500 words, and you realise that the removal of these words and phrases has lost you 30%.

Usually the meaning is still exactly the same but the piece is far easier to read. (While you are at it, also score out those clauses that frame the content, like “we may consider that”, “it is likely that”, “there is a possibility that”.) Delete all adverbs and adverbial phrases, all those “surprisingly”, “interestingly”, “very”, “extremely”, fortunately”, “on the other hand”, “almost invariably”.

Try this exercise: go through a piece of writing, ideally an essay of your own.

Another word for new years resolution