Overview

Unit 13: Adverbs

Overview

Like adjectives, adverbs can make your writing or speaking come to life. Think about a time you or someone else ate French fries with ketchup. Now, consider the following sentence: "The ketchup flows out of the bottle." Does this sentence really capture the amount of time it took for the ketchup to hit your plate? Using an adverb will illustrate your wait: "The ketchup slowly flows out of the bottle."

Adverbs modify, or describe, verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They answer these questions: How? When? Where? Slowly describes the action in the example above, and answers the question how? Adverbs are often formed by adding -ly to an adjective (slow + ly = slowly).

When adverbs modify adjectives they often intensify the meaning of the adjective. For example, "The ketchup is very thick." The adverb almost always comes directly before the word it describes when modifying adjectives or other adverbs. Note the positions of the adverbs in the following sentence: "The ketchup flowed rather slowly out of the bottle."

Also like adjectives, adverbs have comparative and superlative forms. The comparative form compares two actions or things and is often formed by adding -er. "Hermes ate his fries faster than Chris." The superlative form compares more than two actions or things and is usually formed by adding -est. "Of the group, Sarah ate her fries fastest." Adverbs that have more than one syllable usually use more to form the comparative and most to form the superlative. For example, "Sarah eats fries more frequently than Chris, but Angel eats fries most frequently."

It may be hard to tell whether a word in a sentence is an adverb or an adjective since there are similarities between them. To solve this problem ask the following question: what part of the sentence is this word describing? Is it modifying the subject? If so, then it's an adjective. Is it modifying the verb? Then it's an adverb. Also, remember to avoid putting two negative words together in a sentence (double negatives).