How to Identify Adverbs & Adjectives in Sentences

Adjectives and adverbs are parts of speech.

We communicate with each other through speech and through writing. Traditional grammar classifies words based on eight parts of speech: verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, preposition, conjunction and interjection. For someone learning grammar, adverbs are a bit more difficult to understand than adjectives. Most adverbs tell you how, where or when something is done, and they also describe the manner, place and time of an action. Adjectives are used to describe nouns and can describe colors such as blue or green, sizes such as large and small or personality traits such as happy and sad.

Instructions

1. Check your sentence for words describing when or how something was done and ending with the suffix "ly," such as "quickly," "slowly" or "hopelessly." "Marlene ran quickly through the park." Words such as as "elderly" and "friendly" that end with "ly" are not adverbs, since they do not follow the rule of describing when or how something was done.

2. Look for words in a sentence that define the manner, time and place of an action. For instance, in the sentence "I spoke to Bob yesterday," the word "yesterday" denotes the time of the action so "yesterday" would be the adverb. If a word describes "how," "when" or "where," it is an adverb.

3. Try finding the adjective in a sentence by locating the word that describes the noun. In the sentence "Marlene has a brown dog," "brown" would be the adjective, since it describes the word "dog," which is a noun.

4. Double-check your sentences since there may be several nouns and more than one adjective in your sentence describing the nouns. In the sentence "some men like large, black dogs," the words "some," "large" and "black" are all adjectives, since they each describe a noun in the sentence.

5. Pick out the adjectives in the following sentence: "John was a good worker, but Bob was a better one and George was the best." Selecting the words "good," "better" and "best" would be correct, since adjectives use degrees of comparisons such as "positive," "comparative" and "superlative" to describe a noun.

References

• Your Dictionary.com: Examples of Adjectives
• Guide to Grammar: Adverbs

Resources

• Good Grammar Rules: Everyday vs. Every Day