Free Words Fail Me by Patricia T. O'Conner Page B

there's more about illogical writing in chapter 17.
Space Savers
    Do you use macros when you work on a computer? They let us store multiple commands on one key, so we can do several things with a single stroke. Sometimes an adjective or adverb acts like a macro. It lets us compress several words of description into one nifty modifier. These sentences, for example, mean the same thing:
    Courtney wore jeans
that were faded
and a shirt
that was dirty
and
full of wrinkles.
    Courtney wore
faded
jeans and a
dirty, wrinkled
shirt.
    The second sentence, with its tighter adjectives, makes the first seem loose and flabby. Adverbs can be just as efficient at firming up pudgy sentences. These sentences, which say the same thing, show how one word can do the work of four:
    They dismissed her
in a thoughtless manner.
    They dismissed her
thoughtlessly.
    Of course, you may not always want to cut a description short. If Courtney normally dresses in immaculate Armani suits with nary a thread out of place, you might want to call attention to her dishevelment. Most of the
time, though, shorter is better—especially when you're short on room and long on description.
Words in Flight
    A little imagination can do a lot more for your descriptive writing than a pageful of adjectives and adverbs. Take a closer look at some of your favorite authors. You'll be surprised at how little their vividness depends on modifiers and how much it owes to imagination.
    I'm not necessarily talking about the literary All-Stars. There's imaginative writing in every field, writing that jumps off the page. Whatever your favorite reading is about—birds or cooking or fashion or movies or gardening—that's where you should look for descriptions that aren't smothered in adjectives and adverbs.
    Are you a bird-watcher? In one of his field guides, Roger Tory Peterson described the chimney swift as "a cigar with wings" and said the purple finch looked like "a sparrow dipped in raspberry juice."Do you read the fashion pages? Kennedy Fraser, writing about a Balenciaga dress, pictured a woman's legs coming out of the ruffled taffeta "like stamens from a black chrysanthemum."
    Gertrude Jekyll, the English landscape architect, wrote that a blanket of columbines looked like "patches in an old, much-washed, cotton patchwork quilt." And the critic Pauline Kael described a noisy, abrasive action movie filmed in the Big Apple as"an aggravated case of New York."
    In
The Smithsonian Guides to Natural America,
Suzanne Winckler had this to say of my home state: "Iowa
is voluptuous, its landscapes all gentle angles of thighs, elbows, scapulas, vertebrae, and big round buttocks." Wowee!
    The food writer M.F.K. Fisher once sneered at party dips as "mixtures to be paddled in by drinkers armed with everything from raw green beans to reinforced potato chips." If that doesn't make you swear off crudités, nothing will.
Good Dog, Bad Dog,
a training book by Mordecai Siegal and Matthew Margolis, compared a seated basset hound to "a jacked-up car with a flat tire."
    As I've said before, don't overlook the newspapers. A tribute by Frank DeCaro in the
New York Times
described the late TV talk-show host Virginia Graham's lacquered hairdo as "an abstract form resembling a Dairy Queen soft-serve crossed with the Nike Swoosh."
    So the next time an adjective or adverb comes too readily to mind, do what your favorite writers do. Use your imagination instead. Rather than reach for the thesaurus to describe something, imagine it. Think of that little cigar with wings.

12. Too Marvelous for Words
THE SENSIBLE SENTENCE
    Like a superhighway, the sentence is a triumph of engineering: the stately capital letter, the procession of words in their proper order, every arch and tunnel, bridge and buttress perfectly fitted to its job.
    If many writers believe bigger is better, who can blame them? Building a sentence can give you a thrill. It's easy to become infatuated with your own words, and once