Adverbs are bad. That’s a common message in writing advice and there’s nothing like actually doing some writing to see the logic behind that message. You can’t eliminate adverbs entirely, they do serve a purpose, but I think of them as hints that maybe this a place where the writing can be strengthened.
There are several places that adverbs stick out like weeds.
One is the dialogue attributions, where the pattern is “X said [adverb]” such as:
"Maybe they have a point," he said reasonably
The problem with the adverb here is pretty easy to spot, the dialogue itself is reasonable, and if it’s not, then it needs to be be made reasonable. Either way, the adverb is unnecessary.
Another is the verb-adverb pair, where a verb teams up with an adverb.
She walked quickly to the door
The problem with this one is that a single verb will work better. In this case, it could be “She hurried to the door”. The single verb, if one can be found, is always better. Sometimes there really isn’t a verb that will work, but it’s always worth considering.
A third case is really a special case of the verb-adverb pair. It’s a single adverb, ‘suddenly’. I don’t know how many times I’ve come across the word ‘suddenly’ where it isn’t needed.
He suddenly popped out of his chair
In most cases ‘He popped out of his chair’ would be sufficient. Sometimes suddenly really is suddenly, but in my opinion it gets overused in a very serious way.
The other case I can think of is the adverb used to modify an adjective that is generic.
She moved very fast.
This uses the adverb ‘very’ when picking stronger language would be better, ‘She moved like lightening’.
Hopefully I can hunt down all the bad ones, but it’s easier said than done.
I think it’s “(…) to modify AN adjective (…)”, and I am not even American. The reason I visit most of these sites on writing is to learn new things and possibly get rid of some doubt where it concerns grammatical mistakes and such.
I admit I do these posts pretty quick and often don’t do any proofreading.