@ Meg
The exampe you give is really more a question of converting telling to showing, and it's a good one. Your way is definately better than what you had found.
And I am trying to do a better job of showing. I am more conginzant of it, and when I review my work I do seem to be showing more than I had originally thought. And I have little doubt once I finish the first draft and make that first edit pass I will be doing a lot more "conversions".
And just to be cleasr, the rest of this post is not directed at you (although you're welcome to play along). You give quite a lot of very useful advice, and I wouldn't want you to think I was picking a fight with you or anything, because I'm certainly not.
I just get a little dismayed when I read that writers should stop using certain parts of speech, or should write down to the level of their perspective readers, as viewed by other members of the writing profession.
And it's not necessarily a new thing. I belive it was Mark Twain who advocated, when editting, to kill any adjective you come across.
And it just makes me crazy.
As an example of a strong verb being helped by an adverb, take the prhase "smoke billowing skyward".
Now, obviously smoke (almost) always goes up .. and yet, in my mind the adverb "skyward" as used does add ... something, by lifting the reader's internal eye upward, following the smoke as it rises, possibly to be sent "wafting westward" by some upper level wind.
Sticking with the noun smoke, there can be all kinds and colors of smoke: Oily, black smoke boiling out; thick gray smoke the color of storm clouds; the hissing white smoke of a fire being doused with water.
But to hear some pundits, these things are all to be cut down, editted out, thrown away in favor of some shorter, tighter text that has more punch.
But geez, its not like they'll be paying us by the word (if they ever do
) so why this almost blanket antagonism against perfectly useful parts of speech?
That's what I don't get.