Cue the violins! In the latest issue of New York magazine, Christian Lorentzen offers a clever, thoroughly cranky rant on a matter of craft that bedevils many a writer. "I hate adverbs," he declares, and goes on to enumerate the reasons. Among them:

Anything an adverb does can almost always be done more elegantly by the adverbial deployment of the other parts of speech. Almost always more elegantly: in most cases with more elegance.

See what he's doing there? (Nudge nudge, wink wink.) Also:

An excess of adverbs in prose signals a general lack of vividness in verbs and adjectives. You might have to say someone ran swiftly or walked slowly, but you’d never have to qualify galloping or lumbering. The adverbs easiest to hate are the so-called sentence adverbs — also known as conjunctive adverbs. Writers who lean on the crutches of “moreover,” “accordingly,” “consequently,” and “likewise” are declaring a lack of confidence in the sequence of their own logic or a lack of faith in their readers’ ability to follow it. Deploying “indeed” is tantamount to saying, “I’ve just had a thought and, indeed, I’ve just had another.” Next time you come across the word “meanwhile,” ask yourself when else all this could have been happening. What is the adverbial phrase “of course” but a smug duo dropped in to congratulate writer and reader for already agreeing with each other. “Nevertheless,” “nonetheless,” and the atrocious “however” are symptoms of an anxiety over a proliferation of the word “but.” But you can never have too many helpings of “but,” and sound thinking will make hay of contradictions.

I give some version of this feedback to clients and writing students all the time. (We'll cover adverbs in the class I'm teaching in June-July, in fact.) Lorentzen rightly notes that adverbs cannot, should not, be banned from the language. Moderation is key. As is intention. In adverbs ... as in life?