Week 6 - Adverbs

Adverbs

Adverbs answer questions like when, where, how, how much, how often, in what manner, and to what degree.

They are often formed by adding ‘-ly’ to certain adjectives, but can take other forms, such as here, now, often, such, well, and almost.

Adverbs appear frequently in speech and writing, because they can modify verbs, adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions, phrases, clauses, and also other adverbs. In the sentence ‘I studied feverishly’, the adverb ‘feverishly’ modifies the verb ‘studied’. In ‘What a wonderfully scrumptious meal!’, ‘wonderfully’ modifies ‘scrumptious’, an adjective. In ‘The birds flew right over the lake’, ‘right’, another adverb, modifies ‘over’, a preposition. And in the sentence ‘I arrived just after it started’, the adverb ‘just’ modifies the subordinating conjunction ‘after’.

Let’s look at some more examples. The entire phrase ‘To the brink of madness’ is modified by the adverb ‘practically’. Similarly, the clause ‘You forgot to check your references’ is modified by the adverb ‘apparently’. Finally, in the sentence ‘He speaks exceedingly well’, the adverb ‘exceedingly’ modifies the adverb ‘well’.

Like adjectives, adverbs in English can be ‘marked’ to indicate degree. Some fit a standard form, such as ‘soon, sooner, and soonest’, while others take an irregular form, as in ‘badly, worse, and worst’.

Some adverbs cannot be marked to indicate degree, in the sense that something can’t be found more or less universally, or come more or less first. Adverbs that cannot be marked include now and then, first or finally, eternally, singly, or rarely. Words like quite, very, rather, extremely, and too are called intensifiers, and while they don’t act upon the actual meaning of a clause, they do emotionally enhance the words that they modify. All intensifiers are adverbs.

The position of adverbs can completely alter the meaning of a sentence. For example, take the sentence ‘I have eyes only for you’. the adverb ‘only’ modifies the phrase ‘for you’. I am saying that I have eyes for you alone, darling, and no one else. However, if I said: ‘Only I have eyes for you,’ the adverb ‘only’ agrees with the pronoun ‘I’, and I’m telling you that you’re so dreadful, no-one else has eyes for you.

Likewise, where the adverb ‘nearly’ modifies the verb ‘lost’, understand that we still have our camping equipment. But where ‘nearly’ modifies ‘all’, we lost a substantial amount of camping equipment - nearly all of it.

Like adjectives, adverbs also conform to a Royal Order when it comes to arranging them in sequence. Adverbs are arranged in order of manner, place, frequency, time, and purpose. Consider the sentence:

‘I meditate blissfully in my garden every afternoon at 4pm to find inner peace’.

Blissfully is the manner in which I meditate, my garden is where I meditate, every afternoon is how frequently I meditate, at 4PM is when I meditate, and finding inner peace is the purpose for which I meditate.

You should be careful when using adverbs, as they are well known for their ability to weaken writing. Whenever a word is modified, its meaning is altered. Sometimes this is useful, but other times, an adverb, or series of adverbs, will rob a word of its power, clutter the text, and add superfluous information.

Stephen King had this to say about adverbs in his book On Writing, a Memoir of the Craft.

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions.

If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique.

If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day … fifty the day after that … and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s — GASP!! — too late.

To reiterate, adverbs (if not used deliberately and sparingly) clutter the page with uselessness, stifle the imagination, and get in the way of otherwise strong words. For example, the sentences ‘Daria walked lazily to the bus stop’ and ‘Jane ate her pizza messily and quickly’, are boring and verbose owing to the adverbs ‘lazily’, ‘messily’, and ‘quickly’. If we then described how Daria walks or how Jane eats using stronger verbs, we end up with ‘Daria slouched’ or ‘Daria lumbered to the bus stop’, and ‘Jane guzzled’ or ‘Jane ingurgitated her pizza’.

One final piece of advice is this: avoid weasel words. Adverbs like actually, generally, apparently, basically, and essentially… are weasel words. One potential prime minister of Australia was rumoured to have lost an election because every time he spoke to a journalist he prefaced his remarks with ‘Speaking frankly’, which sabotaged his message.

So, basically, you should actually, generally use weasel words very carefully. As you can see, when poorly used, these words are vague, ambiguous, and unnecessary.

Conjunctions

Conjunctions are joiners that connect the parts of a sentence. In this lecture we’ll cover conjunctions that function to connect clauses. There are three kinds; ‘coordinating’, ‘subordinating’, and ‘correlative’ conjunctions. Coordinating conjunctions connect independent clauses.

There are seven coordinating conjunctons - ‘for’, ‘and, ‘nor’, ‘but’, ‘or’, ‘yet’, and ‘so’ - which can be easily remembered using the nifty acronym ‘fanboys’.

In the sentence ‘Alfred is very bright, but he doesn’t concentrate’, the conjunction ‘but’ joins the two clauses together. Similarly, to say ‘I spent yesterday reading, writing, and drawing, so I need to catch up on my housework today’, ‘so’ works to join the two clauses, and in ‘we can have pizza, or we can have leftover lentil soup for dinner’, ‘or’ works as the conjunction. Subordinating conjunctions introduce a dependent, or subordinating, clause, and establish its relationship with the main clause. Here’s a table of some subordinating conjunctions. There are quite a few here, and many more that aren’t listed.

You’ll find this table in your course reader.

Consider these sentences: ‘The day is lost unless we make up some time’; ‘I can’t help but sight whenever I think of summer’; and ‘he waited outside until the show was over’. The conjunctions ‘unless’, ‘whenever’, and ‘until’ connect the dependent clause to the independent clause. Correlative conjunctions always appear in pairs. They serve to join grammatically equal parts of sentences. Here are some correlative conjunctions that you’re probably quite familiar with. Take the example ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’.

The ‘neither-nor’ correlative conjunction establishes a negative relationship. In ‘it doesn’t matter whether you pass or fail’, ‘whether’ and ‘or’ establish a relationship of possibility. And, in ‘this is as good as it gets’ the ‘as-as’ conjunction establishes a comparative relationship. Let’s look at our final section on adverbs. While coordinating and subordinating conjunctions connect words, phrases, and clauses, some adverbs can show the relation of ideas between main clauses.

They need to be punctuated in a particular way.

Here are some example sentences.

‘We went to the longest film ever made; finally, it was over.’ ‘They packed lots of sandwiches for the picnic; in addition, they included some cake and fruit.’ ‘They hoped for good weather; however, it rained cats and dogs.’ ‘They left the picnic spot in a hurry; as a result, they forgot to pack their picnic blanket.’ ‘They arrived home and remembered their blanket; certainly, they were embarrassed.’