The week before last Hurricane Isaac dropped a biblical amount of rain on Charleston. Besides the Honda that floated by me as I fetched my daughter from school, the novelty of the monsoon was entertaining. I took photos as college students kayaked past. My Wellies, filled with water, served as ballasts as I trekked back with my child in tow to the Outback I’d left on higher ground.
From a second-floor balcony, a woman yelled, “Watch out for the pothole!”
Pothole, you say? I’ll keep an eye out. Once my child and I fell into aforementioned pothole, all I could think was, well, maybe the woman who warned me could have added a descriptive element. Arguably, an adjective might have done the trick. But then, if she’d offered that it was a “big pothole,” how big do any of us really expect a pothole to be? Come to think of it, “pothole” didn’t really do what we fell into justice. A couple of mid-sized schnauzers could have taken a bath in it. It’s clear an adjective, even a truly descriptive one, wouldn’t have made a difference; it was a matter of choosing a better noun. “Manhole” seems an obvious choice—and its use almost certainly would have made a difference.
Today’s lesson is that all writing is a series of choices. As writers, we shouldn’t depend on an adjective when a noun will do. If you want lean, powerful prose, skip the use of adjectives. It’s a matter of being specific. It’s the difference between a very heavy rain and a hurricane.
Ellie Maas Davis
Ellie Maas Davis is the owner of Pressque, a publishing consultation firm based in Charleston, South Carolina that offers editing, ghostwriting, and marketing services to authors and publishers. She is the author of Shooter: A Woman’s Journey in Combat from Behind the Camera, The Humours of Folly, See Charleston in a Day, and over twenty ghostwritten works of fiction and nonfiction.
