Grammar girl here, today Bonnie Trango will help us decide whether adverbs are useful or

evil.

No one likes feeling useless, but adverbs might justifiably feel that way.

Adverbs find themselves much maligned because they're often redundant or awkwardly placed.

Master writer Stephen King complains about them in his book on writing, saying, quote,

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs and I'll shout it from the rooftops

and quote.

But he doesn't shout it loudly.

He likens adverbs to dandelions.

When one unwanted weed sprouts up, more follow.

It's not that I don't like adverbs.

They modify verbs, adjectives, other adverbs in whole sentences, sometimes smashingly so.

Let's see some examples.

The adverb quickly could modify the verb to run, as in a tiger run quickly.

The adverb overly could modify the adjective sensitive if you wanted to describe an overly

sensitive young man.

If you wanted to criticize someone's cooking and use an adverb to modify your entire complaint,

you may say, clearly you didn't read the recipe.

So adverbs have their place, but often writers can improve their writing by pruning adverbs.

Let's quickly deal with adverbs you can easily cut, repetitive adverbs.

You could, for example, write, she smiled happily, but that would be redundant and no one

would smile happily while reading your uncarefully crafted sentence, frowned morosely, and jumped

...