{"id":96960,"date":"2015-01-21T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-21T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.72point.com\/eschew-beastly-adjectives\/"},"modified":"2025-11-07T11:14:02","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T11:14:02","slug":"eschew-beastly-adjectives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.72point.com\/us\/eschew-beastly-adjectives\/","title":{"rendered":"Eschew All Those Beastly Adjectives"},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]\"Roald<\/a>Sorting through a chest of old letters and photos recently, I came across a yellowing envelope marked \u2018Roald Dahl\u2019.<\/p>\n

Memories flooded back as I opened it.\u00a0 This was a hand-typed reply I\u2019d received from the great story-teller to a letter I wrote to him when I was 17, pleading for feedback and advice on an A level project I was doing about short stories.\u00a0 I\u2019d included one of my own.<\/p>\n

I remember how I felt when he replied \u2013 astounded, and then, with the callowness of youth (see pic!), a bit peeved that he\u2019d been so terse:[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

Dear Jay,
\nYou are asking too much of me.\u00a0 You must realise that I get an awful lot of these letters and you can\u2019t expect me to write your thesis for you.\u00a0 It should be fairly obvious to you what the role of the short story is in modern literature.\u00a0 It\u2019s a big one.\u00a0 Study particularly the American short story writers like O\u2019Henry and Runyon and Hawthorne and Poe, and lots and lots of English ones.
\nIf you want any dope on me there have been an awful lot of profiles in English magazines over the past year starting with the February 1979 issue of Vogue.
\nI have read your story.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think it\u2019s bad, but you must stop using too many adjectives.\u00a0 Study Hemingway, particularly his early work and learn how to write short sentences and how to eschew all those beastly adjectives.\u00a0 Surely it is better to say \u201cShe was a tall girl with a bosom\u201d than \u201cShe was a tall girl with a shapely, prominent bosom\u201d, or some such rubbish.\u00a0 The first one says it all.
\nYours sincerely,
\nRoald Dahl<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Heeding his 35-year-old advice, I tweeted a snap of the letter with the message: \u201cIn 1980, as a spotty teenager, I wrote to Roald Dahl asking for advice on writing. Here is his priceless response\u201d.\u00a0 Yes, I know that contains two \u201cbeastly\u201d adjectives, but I felt they were justified.<\/p>\n

A week later, and with no additional \u2018push\u2019 from me, the post had been retweeted over 1,000 times and favourited by more than 1,500 people, making it my most popular tweet by a country mile.<\/p>\n

\"RoaldObviously its popularity could be attributed to Dahl himself; his books are a part of so many of our lives.\u00a0 But for teachers and writers (and so many of the retweets have been by them) what resonates is the advice, specifically that passed on so memorably in the final three sentences.\u00a0 It sank into my teenage brain and led to a mantra when I worked as a reporter and then in PR: \u2018keep it tight\u2019, whether it be an intro or a pitch to a news editor.<\/p>\n

I remember a team of in-house PRs coming into the SWNS newsroom many years ago to see their story being pitched to national newspapers news editors one morning.\u00a0 The PR director and two wide-eyed interns (I think they were from a rail group) watched as I made the call to desk after desk with the same 10-second spiel: \u00a0\u201dOh yeah, and we\u2019ve got a fun one \u2013 a list of the weirdest items left behind at train stations this year, including a wooden leg, a stuffed gerbil and a jar of pickled eggs.\u00a0 With pix.\u201d \u00a0After the call, the PRs were mortified. \u00a0\u201dYou didn\u2019t even mention the name! Or how many stations were included in the round-up! Or how amazing some of the things were!\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, that wasn\u2019t the point.\u00a0 It was about the story, and you\u2019ve got about 10 seconds to tell it to a busy news editor.\u00a0 These people deal every day with the absolute extremes of story-telling \u2013 terrible human tragedies, major sporting achievements, business disasters \u2013 so to oversell or \u2018overtell\u2019 our\/your survey would show we had no understanding of the way it goes.\u00a0 The mention of the client in the pitch would have been a switch-off.\u00a0 And to have called the results of the survey \u201camazing\u201d would just have been beastly.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Sorting through a chest of old letters and photos recently, I came across a yellowing envelope marked \u2018Roald Dahl\u2019. 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