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 ...

“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 ...

“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 ...

Adverbs tell us when, where, why, how, how much and how often. Without adverbs, we wouldn’t have massively multi-player online role-playing games, no one would have “boldly go[ne] where no one has ...