Here’s some advice from William Zinnser, who has written one of the best books on nonfiction writing.
It’s called On Writing Well, and it’s sold 1.5 million copies. If you were to buy one book on writing, I would recommend this one. Bill has become a friend of mine because of our mutual interest in teaching writing. He’s written several volumes of advice about writing. He did the interview with New Yorker writer Mark Singer in a book called Speaking of Journalism. He has a new essay about how he came to write a book about writing in the American Scholar. I found it on a wonderful web site called Arts and Letters. You might want to bookmark that site.
Here’s the advice about adverbs:
I learned to delete every word or phrase or sentence that told readers something they had already been enabled to know or were bright enough to deduce. I also tried to stop using phrases like of course and adverbs like surprisingly, predictably, understandably, and ironically, which place a value on a sentence before the reader has a chance to read it. Readers, I learned, are not as dumb as the writer thinks; they must be given room to play their role in the act of writing—to discover for themselves what’s surprising or predictable or understandable or ironic. They don’t want that pleasure usurped.
