Death to all modifiers, he declared one day

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The Tongan marines left with a song, their vowel-rich war choruses echoing in the marble halls of a palace built for Saddam Hussein but now occupied by the U.S. military.

Raising only a few questions: What would a vowel-deprived war chorus sound like? ("From the halls of Brno and Plzen" doesn't seem likely to fit the meter.) Are Iraqi children who grew up vowel-poor, with just the occasional diphthong for Sunday dinner, going to remember the generous Tongans wistfully in decades to come? Where does "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" fit on the war-chorus-vowel scale? How come you can write "humuhumunukunukuapuaa" using just the vowels available in standard Arabic and still have vowels left over?

Sounds like it's time to propose another small set of confidence-building measures in the Strunk and White Wars. The Adjective/Adverb Working Group suggests these propositions:

1) Some adjectives are really good
2) Some adjectives are really awful
3) Learning how to Write Good is a difficult process that, in part, involves learning to make that distinction and others like it

The S&W-bashers have no end of fun over the years noting that Strunk & White's "Elements of Style" is better at prescribing rules than at following its own -- particularly in the case of modifiers. Geoff Pullum puts it eloquently:

Look, you don't get good at writing by deleting adjectives. Writing is difficult and demanding; you can learn to get moderately good at it through decades of practice writing millions of words and critiquing what you've written or having others critique it. About 6% of those words will be adjectives, whether you write novels or news stories, whether they're good or bad.

Or, more broadly, you don't get good writing by the rote application of "rules" to bad writing -- especially if you don't understand that concepts like "use the active voice" are really good in some cases, OK in others (as long as fear-of-passive isn't distracting you from bigger problems) and genuinely stupid in yet others. Trouble is, it's stretching a point to call this a rule: It's listed, along with "write with nouns and verbs," under S&W's "suggestions and cautionary hints." And it borders on egregious decontextualizing to find a "prohibition on the use of adjectives and adverbs" in a paragraph that calls them "indispensable parts of speech."

Now that both sides can agree that adjectives are right handy little tools sometimes, let's look at the flip side: the uncounted zillions of adjectives that would have been better left in the dictionary than drawn into some writer's attempt to sound writerly.

How do they go wrong? The general category exemplified by "vowel-rich war choruses" is one way, and it's the kind we'd like to expect an amen from the Language Log gang on: I'm not quite sure what I need to say, but that stuff sounds weird, so I'll call it something pseudo-linguistic, whether the result means anything or not.

Here's another (just to rein things in, let's stay within the A section of a major metropolitan newspaper): The as-opposed-to adjective, meant to make a newspaper sound like something friendly from third grade or EyeWitnessActionNews5.

Inside, stinky manure from 3,500 cows and 9,400 pigs is being fermented and turned into electricity. ... The manure is pumped into large insulated tanks, where it's heated to the ideal temperature for tiny bacteria in it to work on producing methane gas.

Or the belief that the way to distinguish a feature story from a news story is to put an adjective in front of any noun that looks lonesome:

The round metal building with its green dome looks only slightly out of place next to barns full of mooing cows. It takes up about a third of an acre, inconspicuous on the sprawling Scenic View Dairy farm, surrounded by dirt roads and acres of tasseled corn.

"Green" has a lot of merit as an adjective ("dude, is bacon supposed to be green before you cook it?"), but it isn't very exciting when it comes to describing domes. "Mooing" is kind of the normal condition of cows; you really want something like "invisible" or "Uzi-wielding" if you're going to modify cows in some way that makes the reader sit up and take notice. And "tasseled" -- look, I'm still sort of new here, but it started snowing last month. Do you guys normally have tasseled corn in the fields the first week of December?

Here's another category, perhaps closer to what S&W had in mind, under the hed "Surgeon's inspiring tale shot in Detroit":

His remarkable story is the subject of the new movie "Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story," shot in metro Detroit in recent weeks.

"Inspiring" and "remarkable" aren't there to limit or explain or specify or do the other important things adjectives do. They're there to tell you how to feel, but they don't suggest much effort on the writer's side -- hence the age-old "Don't tell me, show me" of city desks and writing classes.

Strunk and White seem to be getting at exactly what they're getting at: Don't use random modifiers to get out of the work of writing. If you pick a wrong noun, don't expect to fix it with an adjective. Those aren't shortcuts to the sort of good writing* Pullum describes, but the Adjective-Adverb Working Group would like to think we can still admit them to the list of Stuff Writers Ought To Know About.

* For the record, the Log in general has some of the best day-to-day writing I run across. And we have a fun parlor trick for editing class tomorrow: Which scores higher on the Flesch-Kincaid reading level test, Arnold Zwicky explaining distributed vs. narrow readings of adjectives or the AP describing a tornado?

Respect the reader: Inch less foam ...

We trust readers -- at least, apparently --- to process a hed like "U.S. to take over Fannie & Freddie." We trust them to know what a "moniker" is and what a phrase like "Feds nab 2 in heist" means. So why don't we trust them to figure out that what we've just said is ... what we've just said?

“There was no airstrike in Pakistan, or near Miran Shah or in North Waziristan,” Abbas said, referring to Miran Shah, the capital of North Waziristan, a tribal region in Pakistan that borders Afghanistan.

Just this once, let's give him the benefit of the doubt: When he said Miran Shah, he meant --Miran Shah! Not Spinboldak or Miran Shah Pointe or Kannapolis or Upper Arlington but the very place he mentioned on his own.

Once again, we can't say from here how the error occurred. Here's how the sentence looks at the NYT Web site:

“There was no airstrike in Pakistan, or near Miran Shah or in North Waziristan,” General Abbas said. Miran Shah is the capital of North Waziristan, a tribal region in Pakistan that borders Afghanistan.

Much more sensible, eh? Explain the term, but don't waste space noting that he was referring to the thing he referred to.

The title "General" most likely was deleted before the article was put on the NYT wire (most customers are also AP members, so it makes sense for the NYTNS to harmonize its copy with AP style*). The "referring to" could have been an error in the original, cleaned up before it hit the last edition of the Times but not by the wire, or it could have been inserted by the subscriber paper. Either way -- oh, come on. If your readers have the wherewithal to read a Pakistan story, trust 'em to know that the good general meant the town he mentioned, all right?

This is a particularly repellent case of the "said of" phenomenon, an out-of-control technique for trying to explain rogue pronouns or given names that rarely does more good than harm. Here's a sort of least-worst case from the local rag:

"Cindy has hung back a little, she's not out in front, whereas Michelle has been a surrogate on the trail for her husband," Gutin said of Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

See? On the off chance that you hadn't figured out -- in a story about Cindy McCain, in which Michelle Obama was introduced in the preceding graf -- that "her husband" meant Democratic presidential hopeful Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, we're going to spell it out for you! (Even if we mercifully omit the Freep's usual attributive train wreck.)

It can get worse -- usually, because some writer assumes that any reader who begins a story is unable to load any of it into memory for more than a graf or two:

Hours of standing in line and waiting to listen to Sen. Barack Obama ended for thousands with a 9-minute speech Monday from the Democratic presidential candidate. ... "It was too short," Phil Robinson, 64, a truck driver from Oakland Township, said of the speech.

Observant Muslims across Michigan begin the holy month of Ramadan this week with special prayers and the start of 30 days of fasting during daylight hours. For many of them, it's also a time to reflect. ... "It's about purification of your heart and soul," Begg said of the observance.

The Lions kept 11 defensive linemen and four tight ends. ... "Obviously, a lot of factors go into these decisions," coach Rod Marinelli said of keeping 11 linemen.

Often, "said of" is just a clumsy way of introducing information:

"If there was unusually high traffic on Groesbeck and Church, the camera sees that," Adam Merchant, traffic engineer for the road commission, said of the test site in Clinton Township that's displayed on a wide screen inside the traffic center.

Either way, don't. Do what the Times did. If you have to explain what a source said, do it in a separate clause -- not a "said of." You're showing your readers some respect and saving some space in the bargain.

Speaking of which, back to the original topic:
Another local resident, Mahmood Khan, said that pilotless aircraft were seen over Al Must at 9 a.m. Friday morning.

Here's what the Times has:
Another local resident, Mahmood Khan, said that pilotless aircraft were seen over Al Must at 9 a.m. Friday.

Sigh. The reason things like "9 a.m. Friday morning" are perpetual features of editing tests is that they're classic examples of genuinely needless words.** There is no "9 a.m. Friday evening" to get the one in the morning confused with. And with all regard for our S&W-bashing friends over in the linguistics department, omitting needless words is a legitimate and relevant part of the craft.

If you missed this part of the lecture -- well, DTFM. Eight lines of 9-point type is an inch, and on an 11-pica column, a redundant "morning" or extra "referring to" is very likely to make a difference of a line. Eight of those, and all of a sudden you're serving an inch less foam and an inch more beer. Newsprint isn't getting cheaper, budgets aren't getting bigger, newsholes aren't getting more cavernous. Bad editors do evil stuff in the name of "omit needless words," but that's because they're bad editors, not because the principle is wrong.

Geoff Pullum (I hope he doesn't mind standing in for the anti-S&W crowd) doesn't use a lot of needless words, but then again he's a deeply practiced and exceptionally good writer. Just because he was born with a good ear doesn't mean he should begrudge the rest of us our Mel Bays.

* Hence the tales about "Windows ME" becoming "Windows, Maine" -- a Cupertinoid all its own, though I don't know if any of these escaped into the wild or if it's just told around the campfire to scare the younguns.
**The complementizing "that" is also unnecessary with a simple independent clause following. Keeping it is one of those little affectations that make the Times sound like the Times.