Kaufman spent many years as the chief dance critic for the Washington Post, a job that must demand novel and unexpected ways of saying “leaping,” “lifting,” and “pirouetting”—hence her verb fascination. But she has thoughts about other parts of speech as well, and she offers a good deal of usage advice. Basically, “Verb Your Enthusiasm” is a style guide for newspaper writers: cut down on adjectives and adverbs, avoid the passive voice, prefer monosyllabic words, always say “he said” (not “he shouted,” “whispered,” “stated,” “averred,” and so on).
These tips make for good newspaper writing, but unless you are Ernest Hemingway, who began his career as a newspaper reporter and credited the Kansas City Star’s style guide with forming the basis of his style, they do not define good writing per se. Newspaper writing differs from most other writing because print-newspaper space is finite. The fewer words you use, and the more recognizable they are, the more you can say and the faster you can say it. That is where this modern minimalist verbal style comes from. Joan Didion, the mistress of concision and a Hemingway admirer, began her career writing captions and sidebars to fit around pictures in women’s magazines. Most writers don’t have those constraints, real or imaginary.
Still, Kaufman thinks that, if we are looking to speed the eye and save space, one part of speech we should be happy to throw overboard is the adverb. Her point is that if you have picked the right verb it won’t need to be modified. And many adverbs (“really,” “truly,” “literally”) do seem to be empty intensifiers. “Adverbial crutches are everywhere and misused in the extreme,” she warns (or, if you prefer, “says”). Her particular bête noire is “actually,” which she calls “one of the most annoying and overused words in the English language.”
Microsoft Word doesn’t like “actually,” either. It tells me that “more concise language would be clearer for the reader.” I know this because I have already used “actually” twice in this piece, and I set off a Word alarm both times. Did they annoy you? Wouldn’t it have been more annoying if I had used, for example, italics, as in “sentences Jane Austen wrote”? Adverbs and italics often do the same work, but unless you are J. D. Salinger, who had a genius for them, italics can seem like an artificial pumping up of significance, verbal Viagra. Still, I have used italics in that manner once in this piece. And adverbs, even the intensifiers, can add shading and tone to a sentence. I can see giving them up for directness, but it is a trade-off. Writers have a toolbox. Why not use the whole kit?
E-mail, text messaging, and the internet have swamped us with new signifiers. I no longer need parentheses; I can use a raised-eyebrow emoji instead. I don’t write to someone anymore; I e-mail or D.M. them. “E-mail” is a denominalization, a noun turned into a verb. E-mail was a thing before it was a thing you did.