The adverb is the tell. It is the writer standing between the jury and the fact, telling them how to feel about something they have not been shown yet.
He was driving recklessly. She acted negligently. The truck approached dangerously. Read those again. Not one of them contains a fact. Each is a conclusion wearing the costume of a description. The writer has decided what the jury is supposed to think and has written down the verdict instead of the evidence.
Here is the rule, and it is old. Show the fact. Let the jury supply the adverb.
Do not write that the driver was going dangerously fast. Write that he was doing seventy where the sign said thirty and the children let out at three. Nobody in the box needs to be told that is dangerous. They got there before you finished the sentence, and because they got there on their own, they believe it. Tell them it was dangerous and you have asked them to take your word. Show them seventy in a school zone and you have made them the ones who decided.
That is the whole trade. An adverb asks for trust. A fact earns it. The lawyer who leans on adverbs is the lawyer who has not done the work of finding the fact that makes the adverb unnecessary, or has found it and does not trust it to land on its own. A jury can smell both.
Look at what the adverb costs you. It is vague where you want to be precise. Recklessly could mean a dozen things. Seventy in a school zone means one. It is arguable where you want to be past argument. The other side can stand up and say the driving was not reckless, and now you are having a fight about a word. Nobody can stand up and say he was not doing seventy when the data says he was. And it is weakest exactly where you thought it was strongest, because the biggest adverbs, brutally, savagely, viciously, are the ones that make a careful reader lean back and wonder what you are covering for.
So when you go back through the draft, hunt them. Every word that ends in ly, stop and ask what fact you are trying to save yourself the trouble of proving. Usually the fact is right there, better than the adverb, waiting. Cut the word and put the fact in its place. The sentence gets shorter and stronger at the same time, which almost never happens, and it happens here because you have stopped telling the jury the answer and started handing them the evidence and letting them beat you to it.
The best compliment a closing can earn is the juror who turns to the next one and says, that was reckless, in his own words, thinking it was his own idea. It was. You cut the adverb and left him the room to say it.
