Although I touched on adverbs in the last issue, I have more to say about both adverbs and adjectives.
Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs, limiting or expanding their meaning.  Most adverbs are formed by adding –ly so they’re easy to identify and remove with the search and destroy tool on your computer. Some of my most frequent offenses, however, occur with adverbs that don’t end in –ly: just, always, forever, here, not, now, often, quite, then, there and the adjective only. We rarely add value to our prose with these words and each is worthy of a search of its own. Most word processing programs can be asked to highlight any given word. By using this, we get an actual count and a visual awakening of our overuse of the word in question.  In the end, a good rule is to kill the adverbs and please,  let’s join in a campaign against basically in spoken and written form. Overuse of that word basically sends me screaming from the room.
    On to the adjectives, which modify nouns or pronouns. Writerly writers often use adjectives like calligraphic flourishes to further embellish already adequate prose. One guideline is to limit yourself to a single splendid adjective when you need one. William Carlos Williams’ poem The Red Wheelbarrow would fail if we weren’t told the wheelbarrow is red and the chickens white, but we do not need to be told that the wheelbarrow is large, used, or important—in part because he begins by telling us “so much depends” upon it. (read the poem at www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-red-wheelbarrow). 
    Common mistakes for new writers include overuse of adjectives to describe characters —“She bent her stocky, 5’2”frame to squeeze her stubby bare legs through the locust fence slats.” Ditto for descriptions of place—“The crowded smoke-filled room of the crumbling Victorian hotel still maintained an aura of its former splendor.” The question for the writer is always, “What is the purpose of this description?” I can’t think of any good reason to describe this woman as I did here. If the details are important, I could show her using a ladder to reach the second shelf or having trouble zipping up her trousers. Avoid the driver’s license description unless you or a character is issuing an APB. In describing the room, “smoke-filled” suggests an earlier era or a foreign country without anti-smoking regulations, so it might pass inspection if all the other details weren’t crammed into the same sentence.  Caveat: Anything goes with grammar in dialogue. In fact, capturing the variations in grammatical usage is the best way to indicate dialect and dialect tells us about the class and education of the speaker and may also suggest ethnicity and locale.
Two last pointers on modifiers.
•    Don’t use comparative or superlative forms for modifiers that can’t be logically compared like perfect, unique, dead, impossible, infinite. Something cannot be more perfect or the most unique, and dead is dead and can’t be deader.
•    Don’t confuse few and less. If correct, the sign at the market, “Ten items or less” would read “Ten items or fewer.” Traditionally, less is usually applied to plural nouns that denote a measure of time, amount, or distance and fewer applied to things that can be counted. Examples: I have less money, fewer than ten one-dollar bills. Use fewer words and you will spend less time talking.  Speak less and fewer minutes will pass.
For further on-line  help, Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_disputed_usage)  provides a list of words with disputed usage that is worthy of examination.

Copyright 2008 by Peggy Tabor Millin   Working With Words