Without Adjectives & Adverbs A Story Might Turn Into A Short One.

Do you know the difference?

Honestly, I had to look it up myself because telling a student that I know it instinctively, doesn't help. They need guidelines to make it through the obstacle course of English Grammar. In a way it's rather fun to rediscover those rules that we learnt in school. We did, didn't we? Both Bob and I can't remember having had to learn complicated grammar...

An adjective describes the noun of the sentence,
while an adverb is used to further enhance the verb.

Of course, nowadays with the brevity of words used in order to not overstep the number of characters allowed, a lot of these beautiful descriptions are lost.

Mary sings beautifully. She sings a beautiful song.
Aunt Mary is a good cook, she cooks well.
Simon is a fair and good football player.
Simon plays fair and well.

There are so many wonderful ways to make a sentence come to life and most of it is due to these two points of English Grammar. What for us seems easy and natural, is rather more difficult to master for the students. Isn't it ironic, that if only they would read three or four books a term, those tricky nuances of the English grammar would be as easy as 1-2-3.

English wouldn't be English, if it didn't include a few exceptions as with these adjectives:

• Far-farther-farthest...to do with distance.
• Far-further...to do with order / ranking.
• Late-later-latest...to do with time.
• Late-(the) latter-(the) last...to do with order and ranking.
• Bad-worse-worst
• Evil-worse-worst
• Ill-worse-worst
• Little-less-least...quantity.
• Little-small-smallest...size.

You know, at times I had to take a quick look at the answers, because after a while I start to doubt myself...

Biggi