Confessions of a Recovering Adverb Addict
By Katie Rea — spiritual director, writer, and companion for those listening deeply to life as it is.
A fellow bibliophile recently asked me, “So, what have you been reading lately?”
It is a simple question, except for those of us who read like we are at an all‑you‑can‑eat buffet. I mentally flipped through my current stack: the spiritual one, the sci-fi adventure, the nerdy one, the one I swear I am about to finish, and then remembered she’s an Anne Lamott fan.
Perfect. I told her I was reading Anne’s newest book, co-authored by her husband, Neal Allen: Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences.
They share their writing rules casually and humorously. One particular chapter had me reeling. Neal has a deep, philosophical hatred of the word very. He believes it should be banished, exiled, and sent to a deserted, remote island.
Anne writes, “Neal is a stickler about the use of ‘very,’ and in the early days of our marriage, when he edited my writing and redlined all the ‘verys,’ I used to wonder what kind of rigid, puritanical killjoy I had married. But then I did a word search on the essay I was working on and discovered I had used ‘very’ seven times.” Whoops.
Naturally, I panicked. I opened my website and checked through my 121 blog posts.
The verys were… present. But not catastrophic. I breathed easier.
Then I checked for other words Neal suggests cutting — really, some, basically, rather, important. I sighed. Let us just say the results were rather robust. Abundant. Plentiful. It was an unfortunate cornucopia of linguistic fluff. Crap.
I really liked really. I found really everywhere, like it had taken out a long-term lease. Some wandered around aimlessly, unsure of its purpose. Basically strutted through sentences like it owned the place. And important tried to make everything sound like a public service announcement.
For a moment, I considered whispering apologies to all the writing gods. But then another thought occurred: I’ve written 121 posts! Now 122.
And editing is tidy. Writing mistakes are reversible.
So maybe the point is not that we should — um — never use certain words. The point is that we can choose to celebrate what we’ve created and fix the messy bits along the way. It is easy to look back and be our own worst editors, but our work will continue to grow and evolve.
Because writing, like life, is basically… really… very much… an important work in progress.
So, what words would show up most often if you searched your own writing? More importantly, what might they reveal about the way you move through the world?
A newsletter by Katie Rea.
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