Professional Communication Skills

Gail Palmer
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology

2004

Adverbs
Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs; they introduce clauses. There are several categories of adverbs:
Attitude adverbs Sentence adverbs Time adverbs Manner adverbs Quantity adverbs
Gail Palmer School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology 2

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Adverbs
Attitude Adverbs
Attitude adverbs express the writer’s attitude toward the state or action described in the sentence. They typically are placed before the subject. Some common attitude adverbs are fortunately, luckily, obviously.
Fortunately, there was no need to debug the circuit. Obviously, you need to debug the circuit.
Gail Palmer School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology 3

Adverbs
Sentence Adverbs
Sentence adverbs express the certainty or uncertainty of the state or action described in the sentence. They typically are placed between the subject and the first verb of the sentence, or after the first auxiliary verb, if one is present.

Gail Palmer

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology

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Adverbs
Sentence Adverbs
Some common sentence adverbs are certainly, possibly, and probably.
Computers certainly have changed our lives. Computers have certainly changed our lives.

Gail Palmer

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology

5

Adverbs
Time Adverbs
Time adverbs express how frequently the state or action described in the sentence takes place, or how closely to the present time the action was completed. They typically are placed after the first auxiliary verb.

Gail Palmer

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology

6

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Adverbs
Time Adverbs
Some common time adverbs are already, always, ever, finally, frequently,