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Technical Topics — On Modifiers
Joanna Bourne, Historical Romance
I was nattering on elsewhere about my stance on adjectives As I say, I'm not against modifiers. I'm just not in love with them.
The strongest writing is powered by nouns and verbs. If we find ourselves needing lotsa modifiers, it may be because our nouns and verbs aren't doing their proper work.
At some stage of redraft, it's maybe useful to mentally pluck away all the modifiers — the adverbs, adjectives, and modifying phrases — and look at the writing without them. Is a stripped-bare passage left without precision, color and exuberance? Can we perk up the nouns and verbs? Make them visual and specific?
Can we exchange 'the crisp, smooth-skinned, shiny-green eating apple' for 'the crisp Granny Smith'?
We're tempted by modifiers because they're easy to add. We can slather on three dozen adjectives in the time it takes to locate one good noun.
We're tempted by modifiers because most of the rare, impressive, Latinate words we know happen to be modifiers rather than nouns and verbs. (I think that's because our language base is Germanic. Latin is the fancy add-on.)
And who doesn't want to sound erudite.
We're tempted by modifiers because we don't trust the strength of our own writing. So we concentrate on surface decoration rather than underlying sentence design. Then we end up with the dress on the left instead of the one on the right.
RITA-winning author Joanna Bourne writes historical fiction set in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France and Regency England. It was a time of love and sacrifice, clashing ideals, and really cool clothing.
Source: http://jobourne.blogspot.com/2015/01/technical-topics-on-modifiers.html
