Avoiding Adverbs

Question

I have been told to avoid adverbs at all costs. What is another way of rewriting:

This feature is not easily extensible.

Answer 1

Advice like this is about as useful as people giving diet tips.

Take it with a grain of salt.

If you want to avoid the adverb, you would just say "This feature is not extensible." The problem becomes that this changes the meaning to exclude all extensibility. So, that leaves you searching for an adequate substitute which means "easily extensible". This will likely turn up a word from a thesaurus that may or may not be readily understood by most readers.

The idea being that adverbs rarely add anything to the conversation that wouldn't be readily apparent from the primary terms.

I find this notion idiotic. Adverbs and language have evolved to explain nuances. And, if a nuance requires an adverb, then use one.

Answer 2

I share David M's view that blanket hostility toward adverbs is odd and ultimately unjustifiable. The notion that such hostility has at its root a close connection between adverb use and imprecise description doesn't make sense to me either. Consider the OP's original example:

This feature is not easily extensible.

We can reframe that sentence without the adverb as

This feature is difficult to extend.

In the revised sentence, the adjective difficult does the job of the adverbial phrase not easily. But I can't think of any grounds for arguing that the idea as expressed the second time around is any more precise or coherent than as expressed the first time.

Saying that a feature "is not easily extensible" provides more useful detail than saying merely that the feature "is extensible"—or, contrarily, asserting that the feature isn't extensible at all—so I don't see how swearing off adverbs helps make the author's actual meaning clearer. In my view, omitting crucial modifiers promotes simplicity at the cost of doing serious damage to accuracy.

Finally, I note that not is itself an adverb. Presumably, a strict ban on adverbs would require writers to avoid using that exceedingly useful word of negation, again to no useful purpose.