I don't think anyone's purposefully doing it, but there is a LOT of conflicting writing advice out there, a lot of it written by people who don't really have significant credentials or experience. For me, it comes down to what works. And in the admittedly short samples we have at hand, I think the original version worked significantly better than your rewritten version. I don't think "inched" is more evocative than "crept silently", and I don't think adverbs are such an issue that every one must be deleted. And while the rest of your version is interesting, it's in a totally different style than the original. Style is just... style. Different people write differently, and in this case I prefer the writing from the original post. (Not that there's anything wrong with yours. It's just not an improvement, in my eyes.)
Just to clarify on this point, I'm not talking about writing advice from the Internet. I rarely take that seriously and before I do, I check the person's credentials. I started studying writing back in the early 1990s when all we had for writing advice were books written by seasoned writers. Okay, so it's a matter of personal preference. If you go back to my first post, you'll see that I lay no claim to being an author of children's fiction. I must say, this whole discussion has convinced me to go back to my original policy of not getting involved when someone asks for word-level help/advice.
I've really enjoyed this discussion and think it's good to have opposing views, it makes for deeper thinking and improvement.
I'm sorry it's coming across as an argument to you - to me it's just kind of a discussion? I mean, I believe what I believe, but I think I'm open to having my mind changed... I think this is how I learn, by tossing ideas around and exploring them, but I guess for you it feels confrontational? Sorry. But... I want to keep going! (You don't have to play, obviously). So I looked at the current Amazon best seller list (and bought several of them, so... yay! reading!) and read over the first couple pages, looking for adverbs, looking for verbs that, as I understand the term, would be considered "passive" or "weak". I think this board may be a bit cautious about reproducing even short bits of published works, so I won't cut and paste, but... I definitely found adverbs, and I'm pretty sure I found "weak" verbs as well. But the writing seemed smooth and effective, to me. Possibly I'm just not understanding the "weak" thing properly, but based on my understanding and of reading those bits from the top few books, I don't think it's advice that's being widely followed.
I'm not at all sure that you're correct about this. Do you have any sources? Remember that "passive verb" will almost always mean the grammatical construct passive voice, so sources that rail against them without further explanation probably don't mean what you mean.
Nah, it's real. Check out, for example, these "educational" sites presenting lists of active verbs that should be used: http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~cainproj/writingtips/preciseverbs.html, https://www.e-education.psu.edu/styleforstudents/c1_p9.html. Then sites like https://www.sophia.org/tutorials/strong-verbs--8 start talking about "strong" verbs in nonsensical ways, and throw a little passive voice in there to confuse things, like in point 3. The word "active" used to describe so-called "strong" verbs at http://prtl.uhcl.edu/portal/page/portal/WC/Files/Tipsheet+Using+Strong+Verbs+-+A, You can almost trace the thought process - they started using "active" as a way to describe verbs they thought really did something, then heard people who actually knew something talking about active vs. passive voice. Then they heard the people who DON'T really understand passive voice talking about how you can spot it because it has some form of "to be" involved and thought, yeah, "to be" IS passive and doesn't do anything! That's a good example of what I'm talking about! Plus, there seems to be some confusion about what "strong" verbs really are - maybe there's some sort of irregular verb connection, as seen at http://grammar.about.com/od/grammarfaq/f/weakstrongverbsfaq.htm so we shouldn't use "strong" and "weak". We'll use "passive" and "active"! Yay! Confusion was born, and then passed on.
Well, that's just extra depressing. Edited to add: What the flying bleep?! Irregular verbs are "strong" and therefore better entirely because they're irregular? What the... What the... What?
