A Farewell to Adverbs

W hile skimming the Facebook page of a writing group to which I belong, I read of one young writer’s excitement about a new online editor called the Hemingway app. It promises to prune and shape one’s writing so that it can shine “bold and clear” like Hemingway’s. Since I have read every one of Hemingway’s novels and stories, credited him as my first and best mentor, and consistently discouraged my students from expecting an electronic anything to turn them into better writers, I thought it wise to take the Hemingway app around the block once or twice.

I opened my first-edition copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls at random, and copied this paragraph from the bottom of Page 85 into the app:

“We made love there, the room dark in the day time from the hanging blinds, and from the streets there was the scent of the flower market and the smell of burned powder from the firecrackers of the track that ran through the streets exploding each noon during the Feria. It was a line of fireworks that ran through all the city, the firecrackers linked together and the explosions running along on poles and wires of the tramways, exploding with great noise and a jumping from pole to pole with a sharpness and a cracking of explosion you could not believe.”

The Hemingway app rated the readability of that paragraph “poor,” and said: “2 of 2 sentences are very hard to read.”

So OK, maybe I hadn’t given the Hemingway app sufficient time to warm up. Maybe it needed to adapt to Hemingway’s innovative style. I turned the page and picked out another paragraph:

Just then three Heinkel fighters in V formation came low over the clearing coming toward them, just over the tree tops, like clattering, wing-tilting, pinch-nosed ugly toys, to enlarge suddenly, fearfully to their actual size; pouring past in a whining roar. They were so low that from the cave mouth all of them could see the pilots, helmeted, goggled, a scarf blowing back from behind the patrol leader’s head.

Once again, the Hemingway app rated the readability of that paragraph “poor,” and said that not only were two of two sentences hard to read, but two of two sentences were very hard to read. The app pointed out two adverbs that should be removed, and suggested that I “aim for 0 or fewer” adverbs. It did not explain, however, how to achieve fewer than zero.

I gave the app one more shot at appraising its model’s prose. Surely it would recognize the virtues of the Nobel laureate’s distinctive and influential style.

I turned the page again, and typed in this paragraph:

It was a clear, bright day and warm now in the sun. Robert Jordan looked at the big, brown-faced woman with her kind, widely set eyes and her square, heavy face, lined and pleasantly ugly, the eyes merry, but the face sad until the lips moved. He looked at her and then at the man, heavy and stolid, moving off through the trees toward the corral. The woman, too, was looking after him.

Finally the app found something to approve. It rated the general readability “good,” but it rated the sentence beginning with “Robert Jordan” as “very hard to read.” Two nasty adverbs had again reared their ugly, unnecessary heads. I was once again admonished to “aim for 0 or fewer” adverbs.

I t seemed that even Hemingway’s prose was not sufficiently Hemingwayesque for the Hemingway app. I found myself feeling glad that Papa was no longer around to suffer such criticism. Had he and previous reviewers of his work known that his prose was at best “good” but more usually “poor,” would the critic J. Donald Adams, writing in The New York Times after Hemingway’s death in 1961, have proclaimed him “the Byron of our time” and “the greatest descriptive writer of our time”?

Would Gabriel García Márquez, writing in the Times 20 years later, have so publicly admitted that “Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft — not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing”?

By the standards of the Hemingway app, Hemingway’s craftsmanship could have used a good bit of tweaking.

Hmmm. How could Adams, García Márquez, and the Nobel committee have been so wrong? I began to wonder if perhaps García Márquez’s tribute to Hemingway was little more than lip service; had the Maestro learned his craft not by emulating Papa but by stylistically repudiating him? There was only one way to find out.

I plugged these two sentences from the first page of García Márquez’s masterful (I used to think) One Hundred Years of Solitude:

A heavy Gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands, who introduced himself as Melquiades, put on a bold public demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of the learned alchemists of Macedonia. He went from house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Melquiades’ magical irons.

The Hemingway app rated the readability of those two sentences poor, suitable only for postcollegiate readers (which seems to imply that only highly educated people should read poor writing). Both sentences were “very hard to understand,” and contained three uses of passive voice. “Remove them,” the app advised. The only thing García Márquez had done correctly, according to the app, was to use zero adverbs. For that he received a conciliatory “Well done.”

It was now becoming clear to me that Hemingway’s many literary champions hadn’t known beans about stylistic brilliance. They, like me and millions of other readers, had been deluded into believing that Hemingway’s “poor” to “good” syntax offered sensitive representations of action, violence, poignancy, love, loss, betrayal, despair, grief, truth, and even beauty.

And now that I, too, finally understand what it takes to be a good writer, I have embraced the new standards. After struggling for at least 15 seconds, I composed the following paragraph, and plugged it into the Hemingway app:

Hemingway was a writer. He wrote both fiction and nonfiction. I used to like the way he wrote. I used to think I had learned a lot from reading his work. But he is dead now. Times have changed. Phooey on Hemingway. Phooey on García Márquez. Now we don’t need so-called great literature to teach us how to write. Now we can learn to write better from brainless and heartless and talentless machines. Now the brilliant inventors who invent these machines are our heroes. Now multitudes of writers can write brilliant machine-generated prose. So I will try to be a better writer. I will use the Hemingway app. I will aim for zero or fewer adverbs.

The result? I was rewarded with the Hemingway app’s equivalent of a gold star — no suggestions for improvement!

Hey, Nobel Prize Committee: What do you think of that?

Randall Silvis is a mentor in the M.F.A. creative-writing program at Seton Hill University and an adjunct instructor of English at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. His latest novel will be published next year by Sourcebooks Landmark.