Avoid demon adverbs
Verbs tell us what is happening. The purpose of an adverb is to tell us how something is happening.
If you have a sentence like: The cat sat on the mat. ... "sat" is the verb -- it tells us what is happening. You can throw in an adverb: The cat sat indulgently on the mat. In general, skilled writers don't use adverbs much. Unskilled writers use them a lot. And skilled writers delete most of the adverbs that creep into their first draft. Adverbs are tricky. They seem to add detail, but usually they make your writing fuzzy. "The cat sat on the mat" conjures up a clear image in the reader's mind. Everybody knows what a sitting cat looks like. Everybody knows what a mat looks like. You're done. But "indulgently"? How are we supposed to picture that? It's complicated. A simple, vivid image becomes too complex to process. You can avoid adverbs most of the time by cutting them out -- the reader can do just fine without the extra information.
