WRITING SKILLS

Have you ever thought what the world would be like without adjectives? Good adjectives thrust graphic visual pictures accompanied by raw emotion into your mind. When the intended result is obtained, the reader is left wasted and raw, or perhaps elated, or maybe hungry. The writer, meanwhile, is watching with the barest hint of a smirk creeping across his face, content in the knowledge that once again the power of the written word has reached across time and space to pierce and influence malleable hearts and minds.

Sometimes an adjective will not suffice, and so the writer inserts a word picture. I have read books that make me physically sick because of the overuse of word pictures. They can be a substitute for good writing.
And then, of course, there is just bad writing. Here is an example I found:

“I never would have guessed that Grandma would have brought a severed head back from the 7-11, which was reasonable, because she never did.”

Two of my favorite authors are C.S. Lewis, an imaginative writer, and Thomas Sowell, an economics scholar. Of course Sowell doesn’t use many adjectives, because academic writing doesn’t require it. It would be strange to talk about a “liver-lipped theory of economics.”

More on authors later. Who are your favorites, and why?