Adverbs

I read a few posts about adverbs today, along with this word count from Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing

Number of -ly adverbs per 10000 words:

Hemingway: 80

Twain: 81

Melville: 126

Austen: 128

J.K. Rowling: 140

E L James: 155

My count in the first 5k words was 67, so 134 per 10k and that’s before a pass to see what can be worded better, so I feel pretty good about it. There is an argument that adverbs get a bad rap, but I’d rather sound like Hemingway than E L James any day.

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