Adverbs

Adverbs very often end in –ly, and they do three things:

• They describe verbs: I run energetically; he plays cricket badly; she likes chocolate enormously; the river flows quickly.
• They describe sentences, suggesting how you might react: “Unfortunately, we have lost your application.”
• They describe adjectives: “The quickly flowing river passes through our town.”

The same word can be doing very different things in different sentences. In “I fast”, fast is a verb (a hungry one, in this case). In “I am on a fast”, fast is a noun. In “I am fast”, fast is an adjective. And in “I run fast”, fast is being used as an adverb (informally, instead of “quickly”). That is why it is important to use tests to see what a word is doing, rather than trying to memorise which words are verbs, which nouns, and so on.