Adjectives to excess

Brown bourbon, a neon red maraschino cherry, the crisp pages of a letter, a thick piece of cream-colored stationery someone is about to write on.

But bourbon just is brown, and maraschino cherries are bright red, at least if they come from a jar, as this one did. “Crisp” rightly describes potato chips and other delights, but the pages of a letter aren’t crisp, and it’s difficult to think of recognizing a piece of paper that’s not in one’s own hands as thick. Cream-colored? That’s good; it suggests an upscale product.

Elaine and I are reading a memoir — not our usual stuff, but someone recommended it, and we bit. It’s a good story, sometimes funny, often moving, at times terrifying, but the writer lards its sentences with intrusive adjectives. They become tiresome. Here is William Zinsser in On Writing Well , suggesting that most (I’d say many ) adjectives are unnecessary:

Like adverbs, they are sprinkled into sentences by writers who don’t stop to think that the concept is already in the noun. This kind of prose is littered with precipitous cliffs and lacy spiderwebs, or with adjectives denoting the color of an object whose color is well known: yellow daffodils and brownish dirt. If you want to make a value judgment about daffodils, choose an adjective like “garish.” If you're in a part of the country where the dirt is red, feel free to mention the red dirt. Those adjectives would do a job that the noun alone wouldn’t be doing.

Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty, and the sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and frisky kittens and hard-bitten detectives and sleepy lagoons. This is adjective-by-habit — a habit you should get rid of. Not every oak has to be gnarled.

Related reading
All OCA adjective posts (Pinboard)

[The book is Meredith May’s The Honey Bus . Where was an editor to strike brown , &c.?]