Every ordinary life story is extraordinary!

Every ordinary life story is extraordinary!

parts of speech

My “Strongly-Expressed” Mandate: No Hyphens After Adverbs!

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Sometimes a grammar error seems to catch on as if it’s contagious. I suppose people see something in writing, think they’ve been doing it wrong and obliviously copy the error. This is how these epidemics spread. I’ll begin to notice the error more often and in more respectable places, and then finally just about everywhere. We all have our grammar pet peeves, and mine intensify when the error starts to blanket the universe. This is currently happening with hyphens following adverbs.

The key term in this blog’s headline, Strongly-Expressed, provides the example of the erroneously inserted hyphen. Strongly is an adverb, and an adverb’s entire job is to modify. That’s what adverbs do. They modify verbs, adjectives and other adverbs. Sometimes they modify an entire clause. They don’t need a hyphen to do their job. Let’s stuff a sentence with adverbs and see what we have:

Luckily, a genuinely nice person found Lola’s wildly colorful jacket and very kindly immediately returned it to her before Lola had a chance to miss it too desperately or to sob uncontrollably at discovering it inexplicably gone.

Luckily: modifies the clause that follows
Genuinely: modifies the adjective nice. How nice? Genuinely nice.
Wildly: modifies the adjective colorful. How colorful? Wildly colorful.
Very: modifies the adverb kindly. How kindly? Very kindly.
Kindly: modifies the verb returned. How was it returned? Kindly.
Immediately: modifies the verb returned. How else was it returned? Immediately.
Too: modifies the adverb desperately. How desperately? Too desperately.
Desperately: modifies the verb miss. Miss in what way? Desperately.
Uncontrollably: modifies the verb sob. Sob in what way? Uncontrollably.
Inexplicably: modifies the verb missing. In what way was it gone? Inexplicably.

The error of my obsession occurs when the adverb modifies an adjective. In the sample sentence, the error would be to write “a genuinely-nice person” and “her wildly-colorful jacket.” That hyphen is not just unnecessary; it’s wrong. My guess is that it grew from the correct construction of hyphenating a two-word thought with an adjective or noun as the first word. I just did that—two-word. Here’s a sentence full of word duos with correct hyphens:

We typically arrive at each data-driven decision after a late-night, full-team, anxiety-filled session that leaves all of us mentally exhausted and emotionally drained but more closely knit within our committee as well as able to forge close-knit ties to the greater community.

In that example, the first word of the hyphenated pairs is either an adjective or a noun, whereas there is no hyphenation in mentally exhausted and emotionally drained, because in both cases an adverb is modifying a verb. I used both closely knit and close-knit to further illustrate the distinction.

If you go around hyphenating adverb-starting word pairs, I’m begging you to please stop. If you’re wondering whether the hyphen is correct and you should start using it, the answers are no and no. If I’m telling you something you already know and you would never insert a hyphen after an adverb, thank you so much and keep up the good work!

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