When I Stopped Trusting Adjectives

Someone told me once - I think it was in a workshop, or maybe I read it somewhere and have misremembered the source - that if I deleted half the adjectives in my draft, the prose would immediately improve. I thought that was exaggeration. Then I tried it, and it wasn't.

The sentence I remember most clearly was this: "The old wooden door creaked open." I deleted old and woodenand was left with "The door creaked open," which was better. Not just cleaner - better. The creaking did the work the adjectives had been pretending to do.

Why adjectives fail

Here's what I've come to understand. Most of the time, when I reach for an adjective, it's because the noun I picked isn't doing its job. A "small house" is doing less work than a "cottage." A "big mistake" is doing less work than a "catastrophe." The adjective is a patch over a weak noun.

The second reason they fail: adjectives tell the reader what to think instead of showing them what to see. "The beautiful sunset" tells the reader it's beautiful. "The sky went pink, then orange, then a red so deep it looked like the horizon was bleeding" makes the reader see it and decide for themselves. The adjective shortcuts the work the prose is supposed to do.

The third reason, which I'm still working out: adjectives are where the writer's opinion leaks onto the page in a way that kills the reader's independence. When I write "the pretentious academic," I've told you what to think about the character before you've met them. When I write "the academic who pronounced every Latin phrase with an actor's pause," I've shown you something and let you form your own judgement.

The adjectives I kept

I don't want to overstate the case. There are adjectives I kept, and they're doing work I couldn't get any other way. Here's what I've noticed about the ones that survived my year of deletion.

The unexpected adjective. "The blue feeling." "A sharp smell." "The quiet color of her dress." These work because they surprise - they apply a quality to a noun that doesn't usually take it. The surprise makes the reader stop and assemble the image themselves.

The technical adjective. "The proximal end of the bone." "A forged signature." "The ecclesiastical court." When the adjective carries information the noun can't - when it's doing the work of specification rather than emphasis - it earns its place.

The counting adjective. "The second door." "A single light." "Three attempts." These aren't really descriptive adjectives; they're determiners, and they're carrying structural information the sentence needs.

The necessary one. Sometimes there just isn't a better noun. "The red car" when you need to distinguish it from the blue car. "The tall woman" when height is the relevant fact. I try to notice when I'm using an adjective because the language doesn't have a word that does both jobs at once - and when that's the case, the adjective stays.

The adjective test I use now

When I'm revising, I go through and highlight every adjective. Then I ask three questions.

Can I delete it? If the sentence works without it - if the meaning is the same or clearer - I delete it. "The tall mountain" becomes "the mountain." "The dark night" becomes "the night." Most adjectives fail this test.

Can I replace the noun? If the adjective is there to add a quality the noun doesn't have, maybe I need a different noun. "A small stream" becomes "a creek." "A big house" becomes "a manor" or "an estate." "An angry look" becomes "a glare." Half the remaining adjectives fail this test.

Is it doing something unexpected? If the adjective is predictable - if it's the obvious choice - it's probably not earning its place. "A dark forest" is expected. "A quiet forest" or "a stiff forest" or "a bitter forest" makes me stop and think. The adjectives that survive are the ones that surprise me when I read them back.

What I do instead

When I catch myself reaching for an adjective, I've trained myself to try three other things first.

A stronger noun. This is the first move, and it works about half the time. The vocabulary of specific nouns is wider than I thought. "A thin person" can be "a wraith," "a wisp," "a reed." "A loud sound" can be "a crack," "a roar," "a shriek." The right noun does the work of noun and adjective both.

A verb. Sometimes what I'm describing isn't a static quality but an action or a process. "The bright fire" becomes "the fire brightened" or "the fire blazed." "The slow river" becomes "the river crawled." The verb carries the quality and adds movement.

A comparison. Not a simile, necessarily, but a reframing that makes the reader see the thing through a different lens. Instead of "the complicated mechanism," I might write "the mechanism had seventeen moving parts, and I could see only three of them." Instead of "the sad man," I might write "the man who hadn't looked up in ten minutes." The comparison does the work the adjective was attempting.

The year after

I've relaxed a little since that year of systematic deletion. I'm not militant about it anymore. But the habit stuck. When I draft now, I use adjectives as placeholders - they're the word I type when I haven't yet found the sentence I mean. Then when I revise, most of them go, and the ones that stay have earned it.

My prose is stronger than it was. Not because adjectives are bad, but because forcing myself to write without them made me find more precise nouns, more active verbs, and more concrete images. The adjective, I've come to think, is where a writer goes when they haven't yet done the real work.