Adjectives vs. Adverbs
Adjectives are words that describe nouns or pronouns. They may come before (The cute kitten is sitting on the chair.) or they may come after the word (The kitten is cute.) they describe.
Adverbs are words that describe everything but nouns and pronouns. They describe adjectives, verbs, and other adverbs. Adverbs answer the questions how, when, or where.
The adverbs that cause grammatical confusion are the ones that answer how. Below are some guidelines to help distinguish between adverbs and adjectives.
Guideline 1: If a word answers the question how, it is usually an adverb.
Guideline 2: When describing taste, smell, look or feel, instead of asking if these senses answer the question how, ask if the sense verb is being used actively.
Examples
Flowers smell sweet/sweetly.
Do the flowers actively smell with noses? Since they do not, “sweet” is the correct word.
Try It!
Select which word is appropriate for each sentence.
1. She thinks slow/slowly.
2. We performed bad/badly.
3. The woman looked angry/angrily.
4. The boy jumped quick/quickly.
5. The hamburger tasted disgusting/disgustingly.