So how do we produce readable and clean scientific writing? One of the good elements of style is to avoid adverbs and adjectives (Zinsser 2006). Adjectives and adverbs sprinkle paper with unnecessary ...

Casagrande writes that using the correct adverb to modify a verb can often be a swing and miss — just like in baseball.

MODIFIERS give us information about a noun or pronoun in a sentence. They are important because they help to paint the true picture of the information we seek to convey to our reader or listener. The ...

“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 ...

When dealing with compound modifiers, heed this advice from The Associated Press Stylebook: "Do not use a hyphen between adverbs ending in '-ly' and adjectives they modify." For example, no hyphens ...

Adjectives must agree with the noun in gender (masculine or feminine) and number (singular or plural). Make most adjectives agree with the nouns by adding 'e', 's' or 'es'. Position of adjectives in ...

"The pope calls for people to 'give up using adjectives.'" Advertisement Article continues below this ad Those are a few of the headlines that came out in September after the pope said in a speech to ...

For comparisons that are negative or downward, ‘less’ and ‘least’ are used before the positive form of the modifier. To make your writing clear and concise, be careful to avoid using two modifiers ...

Adverbs are words that modify verbs, adjectives or other adverbs. ‘Farmer Frank drives carefully.’ ‘Carefully’ is an adverb describing ‘drives’. It tells us how Farmer Frank drives. Most adverbs end ...

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 ...