Reading a short story, Mary Gaitskill’s “The Girl on the Plane” (1993), I came across a couple of superbly deployed adverbs that made me stop and think why they were so good. We all know the dangers of adverbs, such as using them to prop up colorless verbs (“walked quickly” where “hurried” or “rushed” or “sped” or “fled” or any number of others would be trimmer and more evocative), or colorless dialogue, or just as pleonastic waste (“Damn you!” she exclaimed furiously.) But these several...
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