While repurposing my old academic papers, I’m discovering my supposedly irrational love of adverbs has not faltered through the years. Without a doubt, I’m a far better writer a decade after writing many of these pieces I’ve been revising. As I’m rewriting, I’ll use the wonderful Hemingway App to help trim down some run-on sentences and rather wordy clusters. While doing that, I’m discovering that I truly still love adverbs as much now as I ever did.

I tend to be rather verbose in my initial wordings of things. I rarely focus on readability when I’m trying to get my ideas down. Really, it shouldn’t be the focus of any writer when undertaking a first draft. Yet, I always feel I must overload every sentence with every possible word I could use. 

Sometimes, I find myself repeating the same idea in different words. Apparently, I wasn’t sure I got it across correctly the first time. Having an app to help trim things down into a more accessible state sometimes seems necessary. That is, if I wish to continue publishing things people actually want to read! 

During this process, I started splitting up my sentences more often. Yes, it’s OK to have only a single idea expressed before a period. In my first drafts, I often have three or four ideas packed into a long train broken up only by the occasional comma.

One place where my writing has evolved for the better is the use, or lack thereof, of passive voice. Today, I certainly use far less passive voice than I once did. I think it was a result of writing too much about the past, in general. Yet, as I understand it, historians are taught to write “living history,” right? Aren’t you supposed to write about even the past in the present tense? It seems I didn’t get the memo for a while. 

Still, I don’t get why I use adverbs so much. I like to just give my sentences an extra kick at the end. I don’t use them excessively purely to load “weak” verbs with extra undeserved kick. I use them because I like them. Perhaps it’s the suffix -ly that draws me to them. Really, I just like using them. If you want me to sue me in the Court of Proper Grammar Usage or whatever, go right ahead. I’ll happily contest your mistrust of my fondness for excessive adverb usage!

Oddly, according to the Hemingway App, I’ve written this bit at a 6th grade reading level! This is at the perfect readability level to share on the web! Right on! Still, I used a whopping twelve adverbs when I should have only used three or fewer in a piece of this length… Oh, well!