Incorrectly Placing Adverbs – Sentence Structure#4

Incorrectly Placing Adverbs 

On my last 3 posts, I showed how messy my Grammar is by Grammarly’s standards.

Contextual Spelling: 349
Grammer: 212
Punctuation: 999+ (Um that’s embarrassing)
Sentence Structure: 19
Style: 127
Vocabulary Enhancement: 267

Here are some common sentence structure problems found. If you missed a previous post you can click on the crossed out links here.
Incorrect word order  .
Missing Verb  .
Squinting Modifier  .
Incorrect Adverb Placement
Missing _____ in emphatic sentence

Incorrect Adverb Placement.

Oops, this only happened once in my draft. I know I’m not the only person in the world to do this so I won’t bother myself with being too embarrassed.

I’ll start with a refresher and elaborate on what an adverb is.

Adverbs are words that modify a verb, an adjective or another adverb. An adverb qualifies or modifies a verb and it tells us more about the verb.

(The man ran quickly).

Here are some examples. The adverb is in red and the verb that it modifies is in green.

• Anne speaks softly.
• Afterwards, she danced with Tony.
• Anne shops locally.

These sentences can work without the adverb in red, but they are better with a modifier that gives the verb a who, what, where, how description. Sure Anne shops. But to say shes shops locally gives her shopping more value.

Adjectives can also be modified by adverbs. However, most adjectives fall into the filter word category and are ‘boring’ here are some examples of adjectives and how I would fix them further

The verb in the sentence is meowed.

The cat meowed.

How did the cat meow? Add an adverb to the verb

The cat meowed loudly.

To give a ‘when’ to the sentence add another adverb…

Yesterday, The cat meowed loudly.

To add depth to the cat, add an adjective

Yesterday, The white cat meowed loudly.

White is boring, let’s beef it up. Now to add an adverb to modify the adjective

Yesterday, The soft white cat meowed loudly.

Last but not least to add an adverb modifying the adverb. This is a filter word and I would normally leave it out.

Yesterday, The soft white cat meowed very loudly.

I only had one Incorrect adverb placement from my book. Placing them incorrectly seems to be a typo or me just writing too fast. I would catch this on my “ing” search-and-destroy edit.

This one is an easy fix by simply reversing ringing repeatedly to repeatedly ringing. Now on a side note ringing is “ing-ing” and I would probably rewrite the sentence. Also, I could hear is more of a tell, not show.

I would rewrite this to:

The simple word justice repeatedly rang in my ears.
Or
The word justice repeatedly rang in my ears.

My advice about Incorrect adverb placement:

These are pretty easy to find if you read the sentence aloud or have someone else read it. They chop up the sentence or make them awkward to read. I still recommend having a professional or a program to help find them. The ones that are built into word processors are usually not enough.

-Sheryl

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