Let me disagree.

Many words in the "rather say" column hinder clear communication.

* If a dictionary visit is required, you've failed the audience.

* If multiple interpretations are possible, you've failed yourself.

Ex:

- Sagacious is out of favor since 1920 (google ngram).

- Solemn vs 'very serious' (implies religious aspects where there were none)

- Accomplished vs 'very capable (implies having attained something, not the potential to do so)

- Unyielding vs 'very strong' (replacement rarely applies) etc etc

  Use of sagacious is not sagacious and a solemn problem indeed.
  This accomplished man, accomplished tiny.
  Behold, unyielding password encryption.

This reminds me of an English teacher I had in high school who disallowed us from using a list of banned words in a writing assignment. In previous assignments students had overused them to pad their word count and to inflate the apparent sophistication of their vocabulary. Among these words were "basically" and "essentially" which he told us were garbage words (as far as essay-writing as concerned). It stuck with me.

There seem to be many words which are useful in conversation but for whatever reason are not that good for efficient writing, or so overused in speech (for lack of better words as one scrambles for word choice in real time) that it's hard to avoid using them in writing.

When I first moved to America, my speech was interpreted as not enthusiastic. A trick I use to now is to just put very in front of everything. I'm very happy that this fixed the problem.

But what if I want to say "very terrified"?

As a side note, I was always amused by the number of generic superlatives available in many languages. In English, we've already got "very", and "damn" as the site mentions, along with "really", "extremely", "amazingly" and so on. In British English, you can say "bloody" or "damnedly" or "shockingly" or "terribly" or any of a vast number of other superlatives, not to ignore the crass "fucking".

My favourite has to be the French "vachement", which could be translated as "cowly".

This is the very model of a modern formal reference

The rule should be respected but not treated with due deference

The use for truth or 'verity' is evident but venerable

We very much avoid the use of very much in general.

The problem with style guides is that they're often conflated by both the reader and the writer as rulebooks. They should instead be used as sources of writing ideas, or communication improvement aids -- to target writing for specific audiences.

English can be assembled in all kinds of wonderful and creative ways. The best writing is when you coin a phrase that style guides insist shouldn't work, but communicate something beautifully. "Most excellent", for example, is a wonderful example. It's concise, it's nonstandard and it's brings about vivid imagery of two time travelling wanna be rock stars.

The worst style guides are outright wrong. "very afraid" doesn't mean "terrified". How lame does "be afraid, be very afraid" sounds as "be afraid, be terrified"? "very poor" doesn't mean "destitute", I grew up very poor, but we were never destitute. Being "very rude" is has a very different connotation from "vulgar". This guide takes finely graded connotations and turns them into extremes.

It's worth using it to double check if what you mean is the extreme, and you accidentally used something else, but beyond that, a search and replace of "very <word>" with any of these suggestions is likely to make your writing worse.

English can be beautiful, enjoy it.

I was always bothered by the overuse of the word "pretty" on the Internet in place of "very." As a non-native English speaker, I grew up thinking of pretty as synonym of beautiful. Now that I see everyone using it as they would use very, I find it hard to parse.

Isn't this ass-backwards? It seems to me that if exhausted really does just mean the same as "very tired", etc, we should be dumping all these other more intense adjectives. If your purpose in writing is to communicate, then needlessly complicating your speech with uncommon words is a bug, not a feature.

When I was in high school we couldn't use the verb "to be" in assignments for English class. No is, am, are, was, were, has been, will be, etc.

Of course this is overly restrictive, but 80-90% of the time there was a better way to phrase the sentence if you thought about removing the "be" verb. 10% of the time it was awkward, which sucked.

Aside: also taught me that MS Word has a very advanced find feature where I could give it "be" and it would find me all of the above conjugations.

Consider not using the word "sagacious", though.

I can't agree with her article. These are legitimate words with their own distinct connotations. Saying "very old" conveys a different idea than saying "ancient".

She's encouraging sensationalist writing where down-to-earth content would often be easier to understand and convey the author's meaning clearer and more accurately.

OCR'd it since I'm going to add it to my dotfiles. Might help somebody:

http://paste.ubuntu.com/6949984/

'Very' isn't necessarily a bad modifier, it just shouldn't be used very often.

And then next week we will get an article on how not to alienate your readers with pointless, highfalutin language like "sagacious" and "jubilant."

It's a huge blind spot for writers to believe that repetition has a cost, but large vocabularies don't. This is ingrained in them by English teachers, because avoiding repetition and using lots of fancy words is hard work, and thus that is what teachers value.

For most readers, though, the opposite is closer to the truth: They will ignore repetition (or might even interpret it as useful structure) until the point where it becomes ridiculous, but they quickly get stuck on odd words or language usage that requires them to work to read a piece.

A small minority of prescriptive linguists: "People are saying FOO a lot. We don't like them saying FOO. Let's tell them not to say FOO and try to teach them alternatives."

Everybody else: "FOO"

And the world keeps on turning.

I wonder what Orwell would think. As mentioned in an article on writing by Orwell, posted here some time ago, didn't he prefer simple constructions such as "very poor" to "destitute"? I wonder if he would think most of the recommendations are actually snobbish and more complex to understand.

Not saying Orwell is right and the article wrong. Just that this kind of recommendations is very subjective (quick, someone find me a replacement for "very subjective"!). A matter of taste, actually, and not all accomplished writers agree on this.

Have you ever read 1984. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

I'm of the opinion we should dispose of useless words. Why even have the word terrified in the dictionary when you can use very afraid?

Very good and you'd use superb? Over the dozens of other words that can be used to replace good? I say get rid of them all. I'd also go with the idea of removing antonyms in exchange for un- prefixed words because you do have the issue that antonyms are not exact opposite.

You also have the issue with the comparisons that very can be less intensive. Very wet does not mean soaked. Additionally, being anxious modernly implies a mixture of stress, worry, possibly fright. Potentially changing your meaning is not usually desired.

However, this article only describes how to avoid using very, and that may be a good goal. There are many times when you can better describe your meaning without using very. However, you cannot do it in every instance.

That "substitute 'damn'" quote is damn good, but the attribution to Twain is damn bogus:

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/29/substitute-damn/

He never said that the coldest winter he spent was a summer in San Francisco either. Damn.

Avoiding words seems rather arbitrary. English has a lot of over-used words, for example the words "of", "a", "the", "with", etc, etc. It seems more likely to me that people just associate certain styles of writing with professional or amateur writers. Rather than the style of writing being objectively superior.

For example use of slang or misspellings becomes highly associated with the education or intelligence of the writer. This creates a feedback loop where people trying to appear as high-status as possible imitate the writing style, look up standardized spellings, avoid "less-formal" words, etc.

I'm not saying that this is true in this case, it's just something I notice.

This naturally lends itself to being implemented inside a tool that searches for the word "very" in a text and if the next word is one of those listed, replaces both with that occurrence.

The advice attributed to Kleinbaum is actually from the movie Dead Poets Society, written by Tom Schulman (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097165). Googling for "Kleinbaum + Dead Poets Society" suggests that it is a novelisation that came later: http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Poets-Society-N-Kleinbaum/dp/1401....

I find such tips handy for writing. Don't use "very"; avoid starting a sentence with "I" [1]; don't end words with "ly"; avoid "to be"; etc.

An excellent summary of such tips is Stephen King's On Writing. While the bulk of it is interesting (autobiography), the 16-page section "Toolbox" is a fantastic collection of writing guidance. Highly recommended, to the point that I look for opportunities to mention it.

[1] - I know. Selective breaking of rules has its place too.

This is a good list and lesson.

I remember learning about this in my creative writing classes in college, and the other great tip we got at about the same time was to do something similar when writing in past tense by ditching the "ings" and changing references like "he was running home" with "he ran home" or "she was burning the papers" with "she burned the papers". It turns out that too many "ings" can make a story drag.

Wow. Such article, Very informative, Much useful, So cool.

A useless word I see used often is "just" as in "you just do" or "i just need". For me, it implies triviality or adds nothing.

Rules like these aren't really good guide to style though. They are the sort of guidelines suited to curing teenagers of bad habits. That's the problem I have with articles like these. They aren't adult discussions of language; they do not teach effective writing, and do not promote an understanding of language. One should ideally outgrow such pedagogy by one's second year of college.

See also: "really" and "actually". An easy way to improve your writing is to do a quick edit and remove all instances of these no-op words then go back and adjust.

Also, "of course" and "obviously".

Might be interesting to automatically keep a running count of words used in your writing (across formats), and make a habit of avoiding what you've been overusing.

well Macie at the end of the day it worked for Dickens and Dumas :-)

Apologizes for using footballer speak :-)

"pretty" as an adverb to mean "to a moderately high degree" is pretty standard for English speakers. "It's pretty hot" means it's more than warm, but not hot".

Interestingly, the forms that you liken to "beautiful" actually parse to a native English speaker as "attractive but not quite beautiful".

So, on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the top), "pretty" has the connotation of maybe a 7 or 8 on any scale, beauty or otherwise. And that's basically how it always parses out in English. Just consider it as a 7-8 whatever on a 1-10 scale.

note if the scale is inverse, it's the same. Suppose 1-10 was a scale of ugliness (with 10 being most ugly) "pretty ugly" is still a 7-8 on that scale. Same with "pretty cold" if the 10 means "coldest possible".

"very" is used to emphasize something. "She's very pretty." Means she's somewhere between pretty and outright beautiful, but more on the beautiful side ("she's almost beautiful" has a bad connotation that there's something wrong with her).

"It's very hot" would mean not only is it hot, but it's a little extra hot.

It's like adding a .5 to anything on that 10 point scale.

So if "hot" is 10, very hot is a 10.5.

You rarely use it with words that have a moderate intention, except for specific effect, "it's very lukewarm" is not something you'd probably regularly hear. But "it's very cold" is.

Someone saying "it's pretty quiet here" is saying something like "it is quiet, but not silent, here".

"This curry is pretty hot" would mean it is hot, and hotter than normal, but not very hot in the context of curries.

So there's something in there about the context and that it is a modifier for "more" but not "much more".

I think this is a bad thing for a different reason; people are using "pretty" to adjust expectation downward. saying "pretty fun" is less suggestive than just "fun". It's become a qualifier used for widespread ass-guarding in social situations.

It's not used in place of "very", it means "somewhat" or "mostly". "Pretty good" means not all good but not all bad either. If a server at a restaurant asks you, "How is your meal?" and you respond, "Pretty good", you should be prepared to have them ask, "What's wrong with it?"

I am a native English speaker who uses pretty that way often, and it still bothers me. When I was younger I always wrote pritty, and treated it as a separate word all together. I stopped because too many people thought I just couldn't spell.

Where I grew up we used "wicked" as an intensifier, as in "he is wicked nice." Sound any better?

How do you handle "fairly"? It is similarly polyvalent.

> When I was in high school we couldn't use the verb "to be" in assignments for English class. No is, am, are, was, were, has been, will be, etc.

> Of course this is overly restrictive, but 80-90% of the time there was a better way to phrase the sentence if you thought about removing the "be" verb. 10% of the time it was awkward, which sucked.

I do the same thing, habitually, as a tool to improve my writing, inspired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime .

That is just completely absurd. How would I even say that without using "is"? That .. is, no .. Complete absurdity is , no.. Complete absurdity dwells in that concept? That sounds like I'm trying to write some kind of poetry. The verb "to be" is one of the most important verbs of the entire language. Of any language, even in cases like Latin where it's not said but implied to be there. It is a fundamental tool of communication to equate the existential states of different concepts with the verb "to be". These writings must have sounded awful. No real writing ever avoids the use of "to be". Being is too important of a concept. Cogito ergo sum, as is said. Existential qualification is too important to throw away.

If you believe that, why did you use forms of "to be" just now? "when Im was in high school", "this is overly restrictive", "there was a better way", pretty much the only part of your post which would find favor with your English teacher was "it sucked".