Adjectives and Adverbs to the Rescue!

Blogs are all about telling stores: true stories, informative stories, fiction stories,and even rants and raves. When you blog about your topic, you want people to be interested in what you say. You want people to keep coming back for more and actually enjoy your site. You are a story teller and one way to make your posts interesting is to use adjectives and adverbs.

Adjectives are words that describe nouns and pronouns. They modify nouns so that you get more information that just saying “Shelley”. By adding an adjective, “swaggering” to “Shelley”, we learn a lot more. By adding adjectives to your stories, you’re giving your reader something to sink their teeth into. Readers don’t want to know that you had a nice day, they want to know why it was just “nice”. You can tell them with adjectives.

Example:
“I had a nice day.” In this sentence “nice” is describing the noun “day”, but you can make this sentence even better by using adjectives with more life. You can take the sentence “I had a nice day” and change it into something that has more meaning for your readers “I had an exciting day.”

With the second sentence, readers are more likely to want to know why you had an “exciting” day. This is not always the case, some readers just don’t care. But if you want to write toward readers who do care about what you have to say, then add some adjectives to spice up your nouns.

Adverbs are words that describe verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs. An adverb can answer the questions “why, when, where, how, and to what extent”. If you add an -ly to the end of a word, it becomes an adverb: splendidly, extremely, or pleasantly. Adverbs, like adjectives, give your readers just a little more. Since you want to tell a compelling story, it makes sense to keep readers on the edge of their seats, or at least stay seated until they’ve finished your post.

Example:
“I will eat ferociously.” By adding the adverb “ferociously” you give the sentence life. You’re saying that you have a fierce urge to eat and you may do so savagely. If you had just said, “I will eat,” then the reader may become bored and wonder where the last two seconds of their life went.

What about “An extremely sexy penguin waddled by.” This sentence may not make sense, meaning that I serious doubt that a sexy penguin will waddle by, but the adverbs are still doing what they are supposed to be doing. The adverb “extremely” is modifying an adjective in this sentence, which is “sexy”. We can see that the penguin is not just “sexy” but “extremely” sexy which is more than you can say for ordinary sexy penguins.

If that one was too confusing then look at this one, “the pleasantly satisfied teacher handed out A’s to everyone.” In this sentence the adverb “pleasantly” is describing the adjective “satisfied”, and the adjective “satisfied” is describing the noun “teacher”.

Don’t fool your readers by adding adjectives and adverbs that aren’t true, instead give them something that will make their eyes light up and prove that you are a true story teller.

Written by Patricia Vennes from Writer's Rants
Posted on August 3rd, 2009 and filed under Writing
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