Day 199: Hopefully describes actions; Hopeful describes people.

Hopefully is an adverb, which means that it can describe verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs. Consider this sentence.

“Hopefully, Bob ran to the store.”

In this sentence, “hopefully” describes “ran.” Bob’s running is characterized by hope. This is similar to writing “Quickly, Bob ran to the store.” In this sentence, “hopefully” is used correctly. However, hopefully is frequently misused to describe a person’s attitude about a future event. Consider this sentence.

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“Hopefully, the store will be open.”

This is wrong. In this sentence, we are not trying to describe the manner in which the store is open. Instead, we are trying to describe how we feel about the store being open. In short, we are hopeful. Because we are describing ourselves, we need to use the adjective hopeful, not the adverb hopefully. Here are two ways to write this correctly:

“We are hopeful that the store will be open.”
“We hope that the store will be open.”

The first correction uses the adjective “hopeful” to describe “we.” I prefer the second sentence, which uses the action verb “hope” instead of the weak verb “are” plus the adjective “hopeful.”