Adverb Showdown!

At Slate, Colin Dickey counters Christian Lorentzen's strident New York Mag diatribe "Could We Just Lose Adverbs (Already)" with his own similarly strident "Adverbs Are Overwhelmingly, Indisputably The Best Part of Speech." Writes Dickey:

...Lorentzen is more nuanced and reflective than to call for an outright ban, and by essay’s end, he has arrived at reluctant acceptance. But even then, Lorentzen maintains “their power is best spent in small doses”; he expounds on ways to prune adverbs and other “needless” words from one’s writing. It reminded me once again that we desperately lack a full-throated defense of this runt of the grammatical litter. We need an outright celebration of adverbs, and it is that celebration that I offer—stridently, boisterously, unapologetically.

The hatred of adverbs amongst writers, and specifically teachers of creative writing, has become so commonplace, so unquestioned, and so unthinking, that it ranks only with “show don’t tell” as the most ubiquitous cliché in writing advice. One finds it everywhere. When Lorentzen comments that an “excess of adverbs in prose signals a general lack of vividness in verbs and adjectives,” he’s only parroting the same advice writers have been doling out for years. One finds it throughout William Zinsser’s oft-taught On Writing Well (first published in 1976), which advises that “the secret to good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.* Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.”

Obviously, we're still on the fence. Read more at Slate.