I think the rule is silly.
Can you overuse adverbs? Sure. But you can overuse any part of speech. You can also underuse any part of speech.
Stephen King once said of JK Rowling, "Rowling has never met an adverb she didn't like."
But JK Rowling has done pretty well for herself. And Stephen King, hater of the adverb, has adverbs all over The Stand, for example.
Here, let me grab my nearest Stephen King book (The Colorado Kid) and open up a page randomly. What do I find? Adverbs:
Dave smiled. It gave him a surprisingly foxy look that was not much like his usual expression of earnest and slightly stupid honesty. It occurred to Stephanie now that the intellect behind that chubby, rather childish face was probably as lean and quick as Vince Teague's.
And this from a guy who is anti-adverb.
Here is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education from a professor of linguistics and co-author of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Geoffrey Pullum defending the adverb:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca ... an-adverb/
Near the end of his piece he writes: "And I don’t mean just that fine writing with adverbs is possible; I mean that all fine writing in English has adverbs (just open any work of literature you respect and start reading)."
And commenting upon that article on a different website, poster Warsaw Will have a list of great works with adverbs with I reproduce here:
These are from the early paragraphs of a few classics. All of them, I suggest, would be poorer without their adverbs, some meaningless:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
‘You are not, Cecilia Jupe,’ Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, ‘to do anything of that kind.’
Charles Dickens - Hard Times
Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast. Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre
All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.
Conan Doyle - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Then for an hour it was deadly dull, and I was fidgety
Mark Twain- Huckleberry Finn
Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest
James Joyce - Ulysses
and the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came in at my windows, to which I seem to myself to have been constantly driven,
Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady
Incidentally, verbs like "plod" and "trudge" have very specific meanings. I see nothing wrong with using "slowly" in a sentence like "She slowly made her way across the room" when I don't want her to "amble, meander, wander, saunter" etc, I just want her to walk slowly.
And not just the greats of literature, I'm a fan of pulp crime and noir books...hope to make a pulpy VN once my tenure book is done. And you know what? They are full of delicious adverbs.
Some people cultivate a writing style without adverbs. Which is awesome for them. But if you cultivate a writing style with adverbs that is effective and affecting. Then why should you drop them?
One last note: using adverbs or not, using passive or not, using adjective or not, using long sentences or not--these are not objective markers of good literature or bad literature, they are *fashion* and convention.
People wrote differently in the 19th Century. People write differently when doing pulp. People write differently when doing academic writing.
There is no one size fits all *proper* writing style.
A Close Shave:
*Last Thing Done (Aug 17): Finished coding emotions and camera for 4/10 main labels.
*Currently Doing: Coding of emotions and camera for the labels--On 5/10
*First Next thing to do: Code in all CG and special animation stuff
*Next Next thing to do: Set up film animation
*Other Thing to Do: Do SFX and Score (maybe think about eye blinks?)
Check out My Clock Cookbook Recipe:
http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... 51&t=21978