Any construction can be annoying if it's repeated too often. Think about the smile. What is it that designates it as nervous? Sometimes describing it, whether it's in terms of looks or emotional impact on the pov character, works better.
She laughed, a high-pitched, nervous titter.
He bleated out a laugh.
She laughed but didn't meet my eyes.
But sometimes a laugh is just a laugh, and not every one needs elaborate description. I don't think you can never say laughed nervously or gave a nervous grin.
I remember seeing an editor's site once that ranted at great length about the "gave" construct, claiming that phrases like "gave a smile" makes him think the character is handing someone else a mouth and so on. This puzzled me, because I always knew it was an idiom, and idioms don't have to make literal sense.
But I obediently expunged all such wording from my MS, because, hey, he was a professional editor, and if he says this is the kind of thing that makes editors reject manuscripts, well then.
And every novel I've read since then has at least an occasional "gave a smile" or "gave a laugh." They are all trade published, and presumably have been gone over by professional editors. So I think this guy was talking out of his ass when he claimed to be speaking for all, or even most of his colleagues.
As oh so many people with blogs are.
One thing that's cool about e-readers is that you can plug in and search certain constructs and see when and how often different writers use them.
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