When you catch an adjective, kill it. Kill most of them; then the rest will be valuable.
— Mark Twain
Adjectives feel like seasoning, but most of them are just noise covering up a weak noun or verb underneath. "A big, scary, ancient house" is doing the work that "the house loomed" should be doing. Cut the adjectives and you expose whether the sentence actually has a skeleton — a strong image or action carrying its own weight. That's why the advice works: it's less about hating description and more about forcing precision. Try it yourself — take "she walked quickly across the wet, slippery floor" and strip it to "she skidded across the floor." Same picture, half the words, more motion.
The caution: don't swing so hard you flatten every sentence into gray, joyless efficiency. A well-chosen adjective, used rarely, still hits harder than none at all.
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