Welcome to the Grammar Minute, where we're saving the English language sixty seconds at a time! I'm Lauren Smyth, and I recently came across this puzzling grammar question posted in a forum--unanswered. The question was: Is it proper to say "She laughed softly" or "She softly laughed?"

If you're a native English speaker, the first formulation--with the adverb after the verb--probably sounds ever so slightly more correct. And you'd be right to point this out, but just because one way is right doesn't mean the other is completely wrong. For one-word verbs that don't have objects, also called intransitive verbs, you can theoretically put the adverb either before or after the verb, depending on what you want to emphasize. The reason why "she laughed softly" sounds correct is because putting the adverb after the verb is the default. She ran quickly, she ate eagerly, and so on. If you put "softly" before the verb, as in "she softly laughed," you're placing heavy emphasis on the adverb--something you probably don't want to do in a sentence this short. But you might want to say something like, "She emphatically disagreed."

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