Adverbs of manner

When you use it

An adverb of manner answers the question how: she spoke quietly, he drives carefully, they played well. It describes the action, not the person or thing. Adjectives describe nouns (a careful driver); adverbs describe verbs (drives carefully). Most manner adverbs are built from adjectives with the ending -ly, but a few of the most frequent ones are irregular, and those are the ones you use every day.

How it is formed

Irregular forms have to be learned as words.

Position. A manner adverb normally comes after the verb, or after the verb and its object: he closed the door quietly. It does not go between the verb and the object. For emphasis it can start the sentence (Slowly, she opened the letter), but the end position is the safe default.

Some verbs are not actions but links between the subject and a description: be, seem, look, feel, sound, smell, taste, become. After them, use an adjective, because you are describing the subject: the soup smells good, she looks tired. Compare: she looked carefully at the map (an action, adverb) and she looked careful (a description, adjective).

Adverbs can be made stronger or weaker with very, really, quite and rather: very carefully, quite slowly. They also have comparative forms. Adverbs in -ly use more and most (more carefully, most quietly); the short irregular ones change like adjectives (faster, harder, later), and well becomes better and best.

Some words ending in -ly are adjectives, not adverbs: friendly, lovely, lonely, silly, lively. There is no adverb friendlily; say in a friendly way.

Examples

• Anna speaks English fluently.
• Please drive carefully. The road is wet.
• The children played quietly while Tom was asleep.
• She sings very well, but she never performs in public.
• Tom runs fast, but he gets tired after a kilometre.
• We worked hard all weekend to finish the kitchen.
• I slept badly last night, so I need a coffee.
• The old man smiled happily at the baby.

Common mistakes

• ✗ She sings good.
  ✓ She sings well.
  Good is an adjective; the adverb is well. Ukrainian and Russian keep the same split (добрий / добре, хороший / хорошо), so the fix is to map добре and хорошо to well, not to good.
• ✗ He works very hardly.
  ✓ He works very hard.
  Hard is both adjective and adverb. Hardly is a different word meaning "almost not": he hardly works means he does very little work.
• ✗ Tom speaks very well English.
  ✓ Tom speaks English very well.
  Slavic word order lets the adverb sit almost anywhere. English does not separate a verb from its object; the adverb goes after both.
• ✗ I feel badly about it.
  ✓ I feel bad about it.
  Feel here links the subject to a state, so it takes an adjective. The same applies to look, sound, smell and taste when they describe rather than act.
• ✗ Anna arrived lately.
  ✓ Anna arrived late.
  Late is its own adverb. Lately means "in the recent period": I have been tired lately.

Try it