What are adjectives and adverbs?
Before you find the answer on the question how to use adverbs and adjectives in your college essays, you need to be sure that you know what these words are. It is important to be acknowledged with their meaning to be sure that you place them in the right context.
Both an adverb and an adjective are the descriptive words that help you to make your essay vivid and interesting. They are used to add more information about something or someone as the main function of such words is describing things or people. However, you need to differentiate these words to use them correctly.
Adjectives are the words that describe the pronouns or nouns. Such words usually answer the questions: What kind? Which one? How many? Most usually they are placed before nouns, but in some cases, they are placed after the nouns or after the verb to be. Adjectives can also be used when the author is struggling to describe a situation or an idea. For such cases the structure “it is + adjective” is applied.
Adverbs are those words that give a description of the verbs, another adverb, or adjective. They are easy to be differentiated from the others parts of the language as most often ends with -ly. Such words usually give an answer to the questions like how, to what extent, when, where, and why. The place if the adverb in the sentence depends on the word that it is modifying. If an adverb modifies an adjective, it is placed before this adjective. However, when it is modifying a verb, it is placed after this verb.
Main rules how to use adjectives and adverbs in essays
Using adjectives and adverbs in academic writings could be a challenging task for some students. There are so many rules, and exceptions that make this task not so easy and lots of learners definitely are struggling to find the instruction that answers the question of how to use adjectives and adverbs in essays. One of the most confusing thing in using the adjectives and adverbs relates to their ability to create a comparison. However, if you carefully discover the rules and all the specifics of creating comparative and superlative forms, you can make it easy for you.
Comparative form is used to compare two things or people and can be formed in two different ways. The first one requires adding –er to the word with one syllable. The second way relates to the words with two and more syllables and requires placing the word “most” in front of these words. The superlative form can also be made in two different ways: adding –est to the one-syllable words or placing the word “most” to the words with two and more syllable. Do not forget to use the article “the” in superlative form.
You should remember that if the word ends in –y, you need to replace this letter by –ier to make a comparative form or –iest to make a superlative one. Another confusing thing is the exceptions, and you have no other choice to learn them by heart.
The thing that always confuses the students is the misuse of adjectives and adverbs such as good and well. To avoid problems with such words you need to understand the meaning of adjectives and adverbs fully. Adjectives modify only nouns and pronouns while adverbs modify other adverbs, adjectives, and verbs.
Examples of common adjectives and adverbs for essay
Using adjectives and adverbs in the essays is important to create a more vivid picture. They are widely used in argumentative and descriptive types of paper. If you are struggling to find good adverbs and good adjectives for English essays, you can look through the following examples. They are the most commonly met in the academic papers, and you might find them useful for your essay.
Adjectives for essays:
- Adjectives of amount/ size/ frequency/ intensity: increasing low, high, sufficient, prime, declining adequate, primary, major only, main, hourly indiscriminate, sole, annual.
- Adjectives of importance: important, necessary, salient, significant.
- Adjectives of quality: new, economical, innovative, sustainable, abstract, hierarchical, consistent.
- Adjectives of variation: variable, alternative, different.
- Adjectives of probability: likely, sure, possible, definite, inevitable, impossible.
Adverbs for essays
Adverbs are not used as often as adjectives in the academic papers, but those that are used could be divided into four main groups.
- Restrictives: particularly, only.
- Intensifiers: more, extremely, even, very, quite.
- Hedges: usually, generally, sometimes, relatively, probably, perhaps.
- Additives: also, further.
Keep in mind that those examples of adverbs and adjectives are the most common in academic papers and fit perfectly the academic style of writing. Try to place them in your paper and avoid their simple colloquial synonyms. If some of them sounds difficult for you to understand, use the reliable academic dictionary to clear up their meaning. After that, you will be able to easily use them in your essay, placing them in the proper context.
