More importantly, . . .

 A Tip reader wrote to ask, “Please consider discussing the difference between more important and more importantly, as the latter is frequently misused in an attempt to add emphasis.”

I’ve written in the pages of Copyediting about this subject before, but it’s been a while, and anyway I seem to have been booted (inadvertently and temporarily, I’m told) from access to the archives, so I can’t quote myself!

Those who will tell you to avoid using more importantly seem to fall into two camps: people weaned on newspaper style, who will find a way to jettison anything that will save a character space or two and will tell you that the sentence adverb is short for “what is more important”; and people who have never questioned the unexplained declaration from Strunk & White (in The Elements of Style), “Importantly. Avoid by rephrasing.”

Yet people continue to use more importantly. Why? I don’t think it’s an attempt to add emphasis. It’s logical linguistic patterning.

If you consider sentence adverbs that consist of a comparative or superlative plus a modifier as a group, more important is the odd one out. As Bryan Garner notes in Garner’s Modern American Usage, “[T]he ellipsis does not work with analogous phrases, such as more notable and more interesting.” We say (more) interestingly, (more) notably — and (more) unusually, (more) surprisingly. . . well, you get the point. We also use importantly on its own in a way that is nearly synonymous with significantly, as in the following extract from a medical report:

Importantly, the patients who completed the 12 week ARTI did not exhibit a significant decline in CD4 cell counts.We cannot use the adjective in place of the adverb: Important, the patients who completed. . . (In medical use, significant has a specific meaning; the writer probably wanted to avoid any confusion with that as well.)

The other analogous phrases also have adjectival forms as complete clauses: what is more notable, what is more interesting, what is more unusual, and so on. When each of these phrases is elided, its adverbial role is signaled by the conversion of the adjective to an adverb — except, we are meant to believe, in the case of more important.

Garner gives the use of more importantly for (what is) more important a score of 5 on his Language-Change Index; this ranking indicates a form he describes as “universally adopted except by a few eccentrics” and as a “linguistic fait accompli.” That he will often count himself as an eccentric perhaps softens his use of the term, but on this point he joins the overwhelming majority in declaring that there’s no support, grammatically or stylistically, for the continued avoidance of more importantly.

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Tags: English usage, more importantly