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 ...

“John quickly pulled out his gun, shakily aimed it at Joe, and angrily shot him dead.” There’s one way you might write a line of fiction (or, if you’re a member of my immediate family, memoir). Here’s ...

“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 tell us when, where, why, how, how much and how often. Without adverbs, we wouldn’t have massively multi-player online role-playing games, no one would have “boldly go[ne] where no one has ...

Often, many of us concentrate on changes in tenses when we change a sentence from the direct to indirect speech. Yes, it is good to watch the behaviour of the verbs involved as well as pay attention ...

The World Cup quarter-final game between Belgium and Japan could have fooled many. Japan exhibited some footballing brilliance and threatened to upstage favourites Belgium. But it was not to be ...

Count the adverbs in the following sentence. Therefore, we should wait outside awhile because the very lovely and kindly family will be there soon to tell us fast whether everyone is well. Would it ...

In literary lore, one of the best stories of all time is a mere six words. "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." It's the ultimate example of less is more, and you'll often find it attributed to Ernest ...