MARK Twain said "When you catch an adjective, kill it," an advice that became the title of Ben Yagoda's book in 2007.
Writing experts, who rarely agree on anything, agree the adjective must be avoided as much as possible.

William Zinnzer said that most adjectives, like adverbs, are unnecessary. "(Adjectives and adverbs)," he said, "are sprinkled into sentences by writers who don't stop to think that the concept is already in the noun." Voltaire, quoted by Yagoda, saw the adjective as the noun's "enemy."

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What harm do adjectives and adverbs inflict? They make the writer lazy. Instead of specifying a man's crime, the writer says the man is awful or horrible. Instead of telling how awful or horrible, the writer says the man is utterly awful or unbelievably horrible.

But I don't cherish the "kill" order against adjectives and adverbs.

What the experts abhor is excessive use of the modifiers, which clutter the sentence. Sparingly applied, they re-enforce meaning.

Strong message

There are occasions when adjectives and adverbs are needed to drive home one's point.

The US federal judge who rejected this week Bernard Madoff's plea for clemency called the businessman's multibillion-dollar fraud "extraordinarily evil" and sentenced him to the maximum penalty of 150 years in prison.

Opposition leaders in this country recently described the aborted corruption in the ZTE deal as "excessively unmitigated greed."

At times, one must summon adjectives and adverbs to send a robust message. The opposition leader who said "this government is very, very corrupt" cannot be more emphatic and blunt.