



You can paint a much more interesting picture in your head when you know how or why the dog is running.) (You can picture a dog running, wagging its tail, panting happily, and looking glad to see its owner. (You can picture a dog running, but you don’t really know much more about the scene.) Notice that the second of these two sentences is much more interesting simply because it contains an adverb: Adverbs can always be used to modify verbs.

Remember these basics and using adverbs to make sentences more meaningful will be easier for you. There are many rules for using adverbs, and these rules often depend upon which type of adverb you are using. This function of providing more information about how something is done is called the adverbial function, and it may be accomplished by using adverbial clauses and adverbial phrases as well as by adverbs that stand alone. Adverbs normally help paint a fuller picture by describing how something happens, such as However, spotting an adverb, especially one that ends in -ly is easy. Traditionally considered a single part of speech, adverbs perform a wide variety of functions, making it difficult to treat them as a single, unified category.
