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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26415
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26415
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

English does not have an allergy to adverbs. Bad writing teachers sometimes tell their students not to use adverbs, perhaps because they are not skilled enough to teach them to use them well.

Different cultures go through different stylistic periods. These are cultural phenomena more than linguistic. It is hard to say whether the difference you perceive between English and Portuguese is a linguistic one, a stylistic one, or perhaps simply one of idiom. Very often what readers identify as clumsy constructions as simply unidiomatic. They don't point to a general rule about such construction in general, only to the principle that one should write idiomatically. Idiom is one of the hardest things to learn in a language, so writing in a second language may well be not idiomatic even when it is completely fluent in every other way.

In any case, we should be very hesitant to add to the current stock of prohibitions in the lists of advice given to English writers. Most of the stupid things said about writing are simplistic prohibitions, every one of which can be disproven by examples from great writers.

In the end, you have to gain idiomatic fluency in both the language and culture you are writing for, and no list of simplistic prohibitions is going to get you there. It is not about memorizing a list of what not to do, but about developing an innate sense of what to do. That only comes through immersion in the culture and an attentive reading of its literature.

Original score: 1