Adverbs
Lights most -ly adverbs — the words propping up verbs.
The adverb isn't the problem — the weak verb underneath it is. When you write 'he whispered quietly,' quietly is just whispering back at you. The verb already did the job; the adverb arrived late and took credit. Cut it and nothing is lost. Trade the verb up — 'she walked quickly' becomes 'she hurried,' 'he said angrily' becomes 'he snapped' — and you gain a word's worth of compression plus a sharper image.
The real diagnostic is whether the adverb is doing work the verb cannot do alone. 'She smiled sadly' is weak because a better verb or a detail in the surrounding line can carry that weight. But 'he technically agreed' is different — technically is modifying the agreement itself, creating a meaning no single verb replicates. That adverb earns its place.
Know the limit: fiction and journalism reward verb precision, so the principle bites hardest there. Academic and legal writing sometimes need the qualifier to be exact. Voice-driven work — personal essays, comic writing, narrators with a distinct cadence — often uses adverbs for rhythm or irony on purpose. The signal worth flagging is the adverb propping a vague verb, not every -ly in the draft. Count matters less than function. If the adverb is doing something the verb cannot, leave it. If it's just apologizing for the verb, cut it and find the verb that doesn't need the apology.
In practice
Weak verb propped up
She ran quickly down the hall.
She sprinted down the hall.
Quickly was confessing that ran wasn't doing enough — sprinted does both jobs in one word.
Adverb restating the verb
He whispered quietly into the phone.
He whispered into the phone.
Quietly is already inside whispered; cutting it tightens without losing anything.
Adverb earning its place
She reluctantly agreed to the terms.
She agreed to the terms — reluctantly.
Here the adverb isn't redundant, it's the point; moving it to the end gives it emphasis instead of burying it.
Common questions
- Should I eliminate all adverbs from my writing?
- No — the target is adverbs that prop up weak verbs, not every -ly word in the draft. An adverb earns its place when it changes or qualifies meaning in a way no verb replacement can match; cut the ones that are just apologizing for a vague verb.
- How do I know if an adverb is unnecessary?
- Try deleting it, then try replacing the verb with a stronger one — if either move loses nothing, the adverb was redundant. If the sentence changes meaning when you cut it, the adverb is doing real work.
- Why do adverbs weaken writing?
- They usually signal that the verb underneath isn't precise enough to carry its own weight. 'Walked slowly' is two words doing the job that 'shuffled' or 'trudged' does in one, with more texture.
- Does the adverb rule apply to dialogue tags?
- Especially there — 'said loudly' is almost always better as 'shouted,' and the tag itself often disappears when the dialogue and its context are doing their job. Said with a strong adverb is usually a sign the line of dialogue needs rewriting, not the tag.
Inside Verbaria
Verbaria's editor flags -ly adverbs attached to common motion and speech verbs — walked, said, ran, looked — and suggests a precision-verb swap so you can see the trade-off before you decide.
Try it on your own writing
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Where it comes from: Stephen King's On Writing (2000) made the case famous; Zinsser preached it first.
This is one of the tools inside Verbaria — the writing room that names the craft while you work. Read the writing.