A WORD, PLEASE:Adverbs are just really, really bad, OK?

“John quickly pulled out his gun, shakily aimed it at Joe, and angrily shot him dead.”

There’s one way you might write a line of fiction (or, if you’re a member of my immediate family, memoir). Here’s another.

“John pulled out his gun, aimed it at Joe, and shot him dead.”

I tell you this not to offer you a glimpse into typical rural Florida family life, but to highlight some widespread advice about adverbs. The refrain goes like this: Adverbs bad. Don’t use adverbs. They mess up your prose and smush up your point. Kill all adverbs. Adverbs bad. Really bad. (No, wait. Nix that “really.”) Adverbs bad.

In an otherwise wonderful little book, “On Writing,” Stephen King pounds home this piece of advice.

“The adverb is not your friend,” King writes. “Adverbs, you will remember from your own version of Business English, are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They’re the ones that usually end in -ly.”

Like advice-givers before him, including Strunk and White, King is trying to convey what amounts to a really good piece of advice. But he’s conveying it in terms that make it, well, a bad piece of advice.

Yes, adverbs can be fatty, weak-sounding and can suck the life out of a sentence faster than you can say “Herman Melville.” But that doesn’t make it right to tell people to eschew adverbs.

Here’s why: Imagine, for a moment, that you’ve taken this advice, in its sternest form, to heart. Adverbs bad. Omit adverbs.

What, then, would you do with the following sentence?

“However, John doesn’t want to go there now because he’s not feeling well.”

Don’t answer that. It’s a trap. Here’s why.

Some people would scan that sentence for adverbs, see only the word “well,” and end up with the sentence, “However, John doesn’t want to go there now because he’s not feeling.”

Of course, that would be wrong. A real adverbectomy performed on this sentence would instead leave it looking this:

“John doesn’t want to go because he’s not feeling well.”

The omitted words are “however,” “there” and “now.” That’s right. All three of these words are adverbs. “Well,” on the other hand, stays in because in this context it’s not an adverb. It’s an adjective.

The problem with the widespread dissing of adverbs is that the dissers don’t really know what adverbs are. They’re thinking only of words like “quickly,” “happily,” “meaningfully” and “seriously.” They have no clue that the class of words called adverbs also includes, “therefore,” “tomorrow,” “nearby,” “soon,” “there,” “outside” and many more.

That’s because, though it’s true that adverbs modify verbs, adjectives or other adverbs, that’s not all they do. They also answer the questions, “How?” “When?” “Where?” and “To what degree?”

When is Joe going to die? Joe is going to die tomorrow. Thus, in this context, “tomorrow” is an adverb. Where is John going to aim the gun? He’s going to aim it there, at the Nascar logo on Joe’s T-shirt. So, in this context, “there” is an adverb.

Adverbs can also modify whole sentences, or even refer back to other sentences: “Hopefully, I’m making this clear.”

The adverbs that are the “bad guys” in our Joe example are best thought of as “manner adverbs” — the ones whose sole job is to describe the manner in which a specific action was performed, the ones that really do usually end in -ly.

And, though they pose as tools that can actually add oomph to a sentence, they often have the opposite effect. And on that, King, Strunk, White and I really, totally, emphatically, completely agree.