Day 164: Place adverbs immediately before or after the word or phrase being modified.

Adverbs are great. Not only can they describe three parts of speech (i.e., verbs, adjectives, adverbs), they can be moved around in a sentence. However, their ability to move around makes them problematic.

For example, consider the adverb “quickly” in these sentences:

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“Quickly, he ran to the door.”
“He quickly ran to the door.”
“He ran quickly to the door.”
“He ran to the door quickly.”

In these samples, the adverb “quickly” is obviously describing “ran.” Using it at the beginning of the sentence, however, requires a comma, which makes this sentence choppy. The other three sentences are fine.

Now let’s look at a more complicated sentence, also using the adverb “quickly.”

“He swam across the river flowing down the mountainside quickly.”

Here, the adverb can describe either “swam” or “flowing.” We want to describe how he swam, but the adverb is closer to the verb “flowing,” so our first response is to assume that it describes “flowing.” We can fix this confusion by placing the adverb immediately before or after the verb it describes, depending on preferred style. This gives us these options.

“He quickly swam across the river flowing down the mountainside.”
“He swam quickly across the river flowing down the mountainside.”