In quite a few of those "tips for writers" and "writing rules" that you see out there in the great uncharted wilds of the internet is that the road to Hell is paved with adverbs. If you're an aspiring writer, then you need to avoid adverbs, these people advise. The thinking is that adverbs are lazy, sloppy and imprecise, so if you want to sharpen up your writing, the best thing to do is to search out the adverbs in your prose and obliterate them.
I've even read one expert recommend that you do a search for "ly" and chop out any word where this letter combination appears. The idea here, of course, is that the suffix -ly is the key marker of an adverb... if you're writing in English, that is.
This is a daft piece of advice. For one thing, it will be inefficient and useless at finding adverbs if you are writing an urban fantasy or paranormal romance about a lycanthrope named Holly who works as an analyst and makes soap out of lye in her spare time (there's a nice writing prompt for you - you're welcome!). It's silly and you have to be a bit more wily than that to find adverbs, as not every word that contains ly is an adverb, as I've demonstrated. This "search for ly and remove it" advice will also ignore adverbs like "backwards", "clockwise", "widdershins", "westward", "always" "sometimes" and "abaft" - yes, those are all adverbs, as they modify a verb, telling you how, where or when the action was done. What's more, the rules that apply to your descriptive and narrative writing don't apply to your characters' dialogue. Sometimes, those characters will want to say "certainly", "truly", "absolutely" and "definitely not".
Not every word that contains ly is an adverb.
The truth is that adverbs are sometimes useful. In a lot of cases, adverbs are on the lazy side and it is possible to find a verb that conveys your exact meaning. There are also cases when adding in a description of your character's body language would be able to provide the right cues to the reader, but what do you do when adding the extra bit of body language would slow the pace down. Take a fight scene: "The Red Knight attacked Sir Gawain for a second time, face white with rage and teeth bared. Blobs of spittle formed at the corners of his mouth, his pupils had contracted to tiny circles, the sinews at the sides of his neck stood out and his knuckles had paled with how hard he gripped the hilt of his mace." If you're writing in limited third person point of view or first person point of view, then this is far too slow. In the thick of a battle when someone's attacking, all those little details are too much. Yes, it's vivid. However, the reader is going to start wondering what Sir Gawain is doing - is he just standing there? If you're not deliberately slowing things down for the climax of the battle but it's important to convey that the Red Knight is spitting mad, then there's nothing wrong with "The Red Knight attacked furiously for a second time."
There are times when a well-chosen adverb makes all the difference.
There are also those times when a well-chosen adverb makes all the difference. Partly cloudy is not the same as cloudy; almost dead is not the same as dead; sometimes silent is not the same as always silent.
So what's a writer to do? There are, I am afraid, no shortcuts. It will mean reading through your work during the editing process to find those adverbs and to decide whether not each one is working for its keep. Like they asked about journeys during wartime when fuel was rationed, is it really necessary? Is there a good verb that will do the work of the adverb and verb combination (or adverb and adjective combination) already in place? Does the situation warrant a bit of extra description? If so, then it's time to bid farewell to that adverb. If not, then keep it in.