Adverbs have their advocates, but most writers use them sparingly, if at all. We don’t go for hard and fast rules on this site, but we do believe there are better ways to describe action. Adverbs are fine placeholders when you’re getting a draft down, but a bit of rephrasing and more precise language are preferable.
In a post on the Killzone blog, Reavis Wortham shares his dislike of adverbs, citing some amusing and shockingly bad examples from a recent novel.
“The Novel That Shall Not Be Named is a good, bad example of how adverbs allow the writer to be lazy, instead of allowing the work to support itself with well-constructed, thoughtful sentences,” Wortham writes. “They tend to prop up weak or listless sentences, and that’s when I can’t stand those little buggers. When you find them, re-write the sentence and it will almost always be better than the original.”
