Identify the adverbs in the sentence. If a word ends in "ly," it is most often an adverb. Check that it is modifying an action word, for instance "running quickly," "eating noisily," and so forth. Adverbs alone do not need hyphens as they are not compound words.
Identify compound adverbs and note their location in relation to the nouns they modify. These can appear as clauses in which the adverbs are separated by the word "and," such as "The couple, formerly and vehemently antagonists, got married last year," in which case no hyphen would be used. Compound adverbs can also be modifiers in which an adverb is paired with adjectives and used to modify a noun or gerund.
Hyphenate compound modifiers that do not contain "ly" adverbs and are used before the noun in the sentence. For example, "She got her well-earned promotion" uses the compound "well-earned" to modify the noun "promotion" and places the adverb before the noun. There are two exceptions: the first is the adverb "very," which is never hyphenated (and difficult to use to modify a noun). The second is when the compound modifier comes after any form of the verb "to be."
Hyphenate all compound modifiers used after a form of the verb "to be." If the example in Step 3 were to be written "Her promotion was well-earned," the compound modifier follows a form of "to be" and therefore must be hyphenated.