What “cut your adverbs” actually means
“Cut your adverbs” is one of the most repeated pieces of writing advice, and one of the most misapplied. Stephen King’s line about the road to hell being paved with adverbs gets quoted constantly and rarely with the nuance he actually meant. The point was never that every “-ly” word is a defect. It’s that writers reach for an adverb to prop up a verb that should have been stronger in the first place.
He walked quickly to the door.
“Quickly” is doing the verb’s job for it. A better verb makes the adverb unnecessary:
He hurried to the door.
That’s the pattern worth catching — not the suffix.
How to tell which adverbs to cut
Two situations account for most of the adverbs worth removing.
Next to a form of “be.” “Was quickly dismissed,” “is really important,” “were completely finished” — a be-verb followed by an adverb is often propping up a weak or generic verb choice. “Was quickly dismissed” can usually become “dismissed at once” or, better, a stronger verb entirely: “brushed off.”
Next to a reporting verb. “She said angrily.” “He explained patiently.” “They argued forcefully.” Dialogue tags are the classic home for this pattern, and it shows up in narrative and business writing alike. The fix is almost always to let the words or the context carry the tone instead of naming it:
“Get out,” she said angrily. “Get out,” she said.
The second version trusts the line to carry its own anger. That’s usually the stronger choice — naming the emotion in the tag is telling the reader something the dialogue just showed them.
When is an adverb worth keeping?
Not every manner adverb is weak. Two cases are worth defending on sight.
Instructions, where the adverb carries information. “Press Ctrl+C quickly to cancel the export” isn’t decorating the sentence — it’s telling the reader something they need: act before the window closes. Delete “quickly” and you’ve deleted a fact, not just a word. Compare that to “the process quickly fails,” where “quickly” adds nothing a reader needed to know.
Sentence-initial discourse markers. “Finally, restart the service.” Here “finally” isn’t describing how the restart happens; it’s signaling where you are in a sequence. Words like “finally,” “additionally,” and “consequently,” set off with a comma at the start of a sentence, are doing structural work, not modifying a verb. Cutting them doesn’t shorten the sentence — it just removes the signpost that told the reader where they were.
A worked example: adverbs across a paragraph
Seeing the pattern once in isolation is easy. Spotting it across a whole paragraph takes more practice, so here’s a short passage before and after a pass with this rule in mind.
The manager quickly explained that the new process was actually quite simple, and the team generally responded positively, though one employee said angrily that the rollout had been handled poorly. The results were basically what everyone had expected, and the committee was completely satisfied with how smoothly things had ultimately gone.
Every adverb in that passage is either propping up a weak verb or adding emphasis nothing else needed. Here’s the same passage with each one addressed on its own terms:
The manager explained that the new process was simple, and the team responded well, though one employee said the rollout had been handled poorly. The results matched what everyone had expected, and the committee was satisfied with how smoothly things had gone.
Notice “smoothly” survived. It’s describing an actual quality of the rollout — how it went — not padding a verb that was already doing its job. That’s the distinction worth carrying forward: the question was never “does this sentence contain an -ly word.” It’s whether the word is telling the reader something, or just turning up the volume on a claim that didn’t need it.
Adverbs in business and technical writing
Technical and business documentation tends to collect a different flavor of adverb than fiction does. Instead of manner adverbs modifying action verbs, it leans on qualifying adverbs that soften an instruction or a claim: “please note that this setting is typically configured automatically,” or “the system will usually process the request promptly.” Strip the padding and the sentence gets shorter and more direct: “the system processes the request automatically.”
This matters more in documentation than in prose, because a reader following instructions is scanning for the one word that changes what they should do. An adverb buried in a sentence that doesn’t need it is a small tax on every reader who has to parse past it to find the actual instruction. The same test applies here as everywhere else in this guide: does the word carry information the reader needs, or is it just there out of habit?
Words that end in “-ly” but aren’t adverbs
Not every word ending in “-ly” is a manner adverb at all. “Family,” “apply,” “supply,” “reply,” “early,” and “ugly” all end the same way and aren’t adverbs in the first place — they’re nouns, verbs, and adjectives that happen to share a suffix. A small number of genuine adverbs, like “likely,” “solely,” and “wholly,” also don’t belong in this conversation; they aren’t the weak manner-adverb pattern this guide is about, even though grammatically they qualify.
What an adverb checker cannot tell you
There’s no reliable way to tell, from the word alone, whether a given “-ly” word is modifying a verb (“answered quickly”) or an adjective (“quickly obsolete cameras,” rarer, but real) without a full grammatical parse. That’s a genuine limit, not a rounding error, and it’s worth knowing about rather than pretending the detection is more precise than it is.
Check your own writing
Reading for “-ly” endings by eye works for a paragraph and falls apart for a document. Run your text through the adverb & weasel word finder to see every candidate flagged, with the classic cut — adjacent to a be-verb or reporting verb — marked separately from the adverbs that are merely worth a look. For the related pattern of vague qualifiers and hedges that dodge a claim instead of a verb, see our hedging language guide.