An adverb is one of the eight parts of speech that make up the English language. They are used to modify other parts of speech, but they are not used to modify nouns. Rather, they are used when describing sentences, clauses, and adjectives as well as other adverbs. The purpose of an adverb is typically to answer a question such as “When?”, “Where?”, or “How?”. The adverb can also answer to what degree or in what manner. In the English language, the majority of adverbs end with the suffix “-ly”.
When an adverb is used to answer the question of “How?”, the word is most often created by adding the “-ly” suffix to an adjective. For example, “loud” can be made into “loudly” and “slow” can become “slowly”. It is important to remember, though, that not all words ending in “-ly” are adverbs. Words such as “friendly” or “lovely” are not adverbs because the root word is a noun and not an adjective. In addition, some adjectives do not need to have the suffix added. Examples of this include words like “holy” or “silly”. Sometimes adverbs can be also be formed by adding the suffix “-wise” or the prefix “a-”. Examples of these would be words like “clockwise” or “astray”. In some cases, there is no way to identify an adverb just by looking at how the word is formed.
Many people make the mistake of using adverbs too often. This is especially true when writing. As a rule, one should only use adverbs when they add something of importance to the sentence. Following are a few examples of correct adverb usage:
He is rarely late for work. (“Rarely” is the adverb.)
She frequently spends too much money. (“Frequently” is the adverb.)
We are going to the movies tomorrow. (“Tomorrow is the adverb.)
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