Help me catalogue overused modifiers

Hooray for first thread!

You have a big job. Their number is growing daily. And then you can go on to all the other sapsucker words and phrases, like "watched as" and "the sound of".

Any modifier that is merely an echo of its verb's intent or used to clichéhood can go in the bin. Laughed gaily, whirled dizzily, reeled drunkenly, screamed loudly....

Almost every time I see the words "suddenly" and "abruptly" they are unnecessary.

ETA: the confetti exploded in my house. I expect you here to clean it up by this evening.

silkyeggsalad said:

- kissed gently
- said softly

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These two can be spared, if used rarely, but really rarely.

In general, search for "ly", it should reveal the abused adverbs in your manuscript.

I'm a novice, but I've heard two good rules for avoiding these words altogether.

1) Avoid speech tags other than "said" whenever possible. "Said" is an "invisible" word that people read automatically. When people see other speech tags, they automatically translate them to "said" anyway.

2) Don't use adverbs after speech tags.

run fast
run really fast
run very fast
run quickly
run really quickly
run very quickly

Mostly, I find redundant phrases annoying. But there are others--ones that I really haven't heard before reading specific stories--where authors have pet phrases that don't seem to make any sense. (Off the top of my head, and this isn't exactly a modifier but it fits the idea, is "his eyes smoldered." Since when can eyes smolder? They'd have to be on fire.)

quite

(quite beautiful, quite nice, quite fast, quite wonderful, quite interesting...)

silkyeggsalad said:

you are quite right, sir.


*just a note: I started this thread because I've been surprised by how common place these literary no-no's are in mainstream fiction. I was curious to see if I'm hopelessly intolerant, or if these phrases bother other folks, too.

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Seems to me that when the modifier is used correctly then for goodness sakes let it go. There is nothing wrong with a gentle kiss or a brisk walk when that's what's going on. As you know, those words are in the writer's toolbox for a purpose.

By the way, commonplace might work better in your comment than that vulgar location your 'common place' conjures up in the reader's mind.

And surely you don't mean you are feeling a complete absence of hope with respect to your intolerance in these matters.

These phrases bother me if they are used without thought as to their appropriateness but this thread seems like a witch hunt. And damn if you don't go headlong after one of my favorite things. I do like to be kissed gently but not to the exclusion of being kissed passionately or with a certain amount of playfulness.

Let us know what you've come up with for your catalogue.

Oh and by the way, I think your use of 'quite' here is quite fitting and contrary to what maestrowork seems to prefer, I would quite enjoy the company of a woman who is quite beautiful, quite interesting and quite wonderful. I may not bother with the quite fast and nice, but that, I'm sure is just a matter of taste.

Happy cataloguing