To make her decision, Mary studied each option for hours. Wanting to earn a place on the podium, the runner accepted the steroids. Over the course of a very long night, the surgeon operated on three children. When the clock strikes twelve, my dog howls. In these next examples you’ll recognize a dependent clause, a prepositional phrase, a participial phrase, and an infinitive phrase. We often use a comma to separate multiword adverbial phrases or clauses from the rest of the sentence when the phrase or clause comes first. And that means a comma is required between the clauses. Yet when we added tomorrow, the dependent clause became nonessential. She wanted to see the doctor before meeting with her mother. Note: Without the word tomorrow, we wouldn’t need a comma between doctor and before-we often don’t use a comma to separate an independent clause from a dependent one when the independent one comes first. She wanted to see the doctor-before meeting with her mother- tomorrow. She wanted to see the doctor tomorrow, before meeting with her mother. The second sentence doesn’t quite work, does it? Better would be. She wanted to see the doctor, before meeting with her mother, tomorrow. Adverbs of time often go at the end of the clause or sentence. Let’s consider another example, this one using an adverb of time. While you can be creative with sentence structure and word order, you may not want to make readers wait until the end of a sentence for an adverb that modifies a word early in the sentence.
She raced wildly out of her house, stopping to grab the mail from the box, and headed toward the hospital. Keep adverbs within the clause or phrase when a sentence contains multiple clauses or phrases. And if readers have to read a sentence multiple times, something is likely wrong with the sentence. Would readers easily understand which word wildly was modifying? Maybe not without a second read. She raced out of her house, stopping to grab the mail from the box, and toward the hospital wildly. Readers would understand each of these easily, but what if the sentences were longer or more complex? You might lose readers if adverbs were separated from their verbs in such cases. The following constructions can all work, although perhaps not all of them would work equally well for a particular need. As a matter of fact, we can separate adverbs from their verbs by the length of the sentence. We can put the adverb near the verb, but we don’t have to. While adverbs that modify adjectives and other adverbs must come immediately before the adjective or adverb, there are options when an adverb modifies a verb. Some of the fun in playing with adverbs is moving them around a sentence. So we do separate two instances of the same adverb with a comma-It was a very, very nasty day. There is, however, an exception to the practice of not using a comma between an adverb and the word it modifies-with the repetition of adverbs for emphasis. An example-the Smith’s youngest daughter scrubbed floors maniacally at her job last week.) When all three are used, they go in that order-manner, place, and then time. (Adverbs of manner, place, and time often go at the ends of clauses. She sneezed unusually loudly during the mayor’s speech. The motorcycle accelerated deafeningly before it pulled into traffic. The happily married woman smiled at her mother-in-law. We typically don’t use commas to separate single-word adverbs from the words (verb, adjective, or adverb) they modify. We’ll explore both sentence and conjunctive adverbs in a moment, but let’s look at adverbs in general first. In two particular cases, those of sentence adverbs and conjunctive adverbs, a comma usually does follow the introductory adverb. We sometimes have trouble deciding whether or not to follow a sentence’s introductory word, phrase, or clause with a comma. Februby Fiction Editor Beth Hill last modified February 21, 2016
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