Cut unnecessary adverbs

Flowery writers mainly use beautiful adverbs for amazing descriptions of all sorts of verbs and incredibly descriptive adjectives.

Or, writers use adverbs to describe verbs and adjectives.

In the example on the previous page, Dawn picks up "reasonably" in "cannot reasonably be provided" as one to look at.

Other adverbs you might find yourself using include:

• easily
• maybe
• frequently
• formerly
• partially
• really
• directly

Dawn will also pick up words like "annually" and "weekly", which we clearly will need sometimes.

Another interesting one is "we think". This is not an adverb, but Dawn flags it as hedging: “Own it or cut it — this softens the sentence without adding meaning.” Sometimes of course, it's appropriate:

What you tell us will be confidential, and we will only pass it on if we think you are in danger.

There's nothing wrong with using adverbs, but they add word count to the page. If you need it, keep it. If not, cut it.