Good questions have been piling up in my inbox lately. Ed in Albany, N.Y., had a question about a recent column in which I mentioned people “who just won’t stop using the word ‘over’ wrong.” Here’s Ed ...

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 ...

“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 ...

Recently, statistical bioinformatician Neil Saunders decided to look for sentence adverbs in close to 100,000 scientific abstracts. (You know sentence adverbs: “Remarkably, the guinea pigs were ...

Remember that part of speech called the adverb? It is often overlooked as a possible resource – one that can enliven our letters, reports, and whatever else we may be composing. Today’s column reminds ...

Our discussion of flat adverbs continues today as we, firstly, add more examples. I hope you remember what flat adverbs are: those that do not carry -ly. Rather, they have the same forms as adjectives ...