The Terrible, Awful, Horrible, Deplorable, Despicable, Vile Adjective

One of the many handicaps in my writing is adjective usage. I use too many, too often, with too little results. Arts & Letters Daily led me to this fine article on that problematic modifier. An mq:

As far as not getting respect goes, adjectives leave Rodney Dangerfield in the dust. They rank right up there with Osama bin Laden, Geraldo Rivera, and the customer-service policies of cable-TV companies. That it is good to avoid them is one of the few points on which the sages of writing agree. Thus Voltaire: "The adjective is the enemy of the noun, though it agrees with it in number and gender." Thus Twain: "When you catch an adjective, kill it." And thus William Zinsser: "Most adjectives are ... unnecessary. Like adverbs, they are sprinkled into sentences by writers who don't stop to think that the concept is already in the noun."

from The Adjective -- So Ludic, So Minatory, So Twee By BEN YAGODA in The Chronicle of Higher Education