A Quick Note on the Adverb Issue

While I’m looking out for adverbs in my editing, the one spot where I’m not looking to correct them is in dialogue.  In reality we talk in adverbs — they’re an easy (some would say weak) grammatical device, and they make conversations flow.  I’m not going to change the way people talk — trying to remove adverbs from conversation would make the dialogue seem a little more stilted and unnatural (at least to me).  That being said, I am still removing adverbs from dialogue tags — that’s one of the spots where adverbs are most overused and often the most unnecessary.