Today’s exercises are, hopefully, an exaggeration of the stacked modifier problem. I wanted to overdo it, but to be honest, I have seen things like this on the page too. Have some fun with it if you like, pick which, if any, of the modifiers you’d like to keep, or rework the sentence completely and come up with something better.
Adjective Offenses:
The tall woman’s emerald green velvet dress brushed against the gleaming marble floors as she walked through the wide, ornate elvin hallway.
His dense brown fur lay thick and heavy in swirled patches across his broad, muscled shoulders and strong wide back.
The cool, crisp night air swirled around her ghostly pale skin, raising tiny white bumps. (a lot of the time you’ll find that stacked adjectives are different ways of saying the same thing, combining repetition and over modification. Here, ghostly, pale, and white all do the same thing. I’d probably use ghostly and kill the other two, but the choice would depend on the style of the story and the author’s voice. All of them together, however, is both redundant and overstated.)
He wore tall black leather boots and tight soft green trousers with a wide leather belt. A quilted red vest covered his puffy white satin shirt, and his fluffy orange hair was crowned by a pointy, green felt hat.
(okay, I write fantasy too, but sometimes the description of clothing is a dead giveaway that the author has a devotion to cosplay. Not a bad thing, but overdone it’s almost author intrusion. Some readers will forgive four paragraphs or pages outlining the history and evolution of your character’s tailoring culture, or a full list of the organic dyes used in your world… but I will never recommend it. )
The jagged blue mountain peaks lifted high over the thick, spiky evergreen forest. A low sun painted the rolling hills in flaming golden orange and stark yellow. Puffy white clouds drifted between the darkening purple sky.
Adverb crimes:
Sue silently walked across the room. She quickly looked into the hallway before cautiously opening the door and stepping gingerly into the hallway.
He ran swiftly.
They laughed loudly.
We spoke rapidly.
(okay sometimes in short punchy sentences where you haven’t added too many elsewhere you can happily keep the adverb, but see what alternative verbs could replace these if you didn’t want to keep them as is.)
The ball rolled slowly across the pavement toward the swiftly moving traffic while the boy ran blindly after it.
