February 4, 2012

Welcome to Adverb City

The Institute For Things To Do With Books’ Mailbag Letter #218 Dear The Institute: I am writing this letter to share with you a strange experience of mine. A few weeks ago I borrowed a book from a friend, a collection of short stories by an author I was excited to read for the first time. I started reading the collection, and was enjoying it immensely: however, when I got to the end of the first story, I found the page covered in writing: words were underlined, passages were remarked upon with comments like “brilliant closing sentence,” squiggly arrows traversed the page. I recognised immediately the healthy pencil scrawl of the friend who lent me the book, and while I knew of her habit of writing in the margins of books – a holdover from our graduate school days – encountering it in this way threw me for quite the loop. It took me forever to get through those last few paragraphs. I read and reread the underlined words as if I was stuck in them; wondered at each boxed-in sentence; stared bewildered at “so many adverbs, yet still effective.” Finally, after some struggle, I got to the end of […]