Let's think about where we can put adverbs in an English sentence.

Consider the following sentence:

He is angry.

Now let's put the adverb "often" into this sentence.

Where can you put "often" in this sentence? List all the possibilities.

Here are all the possibilities I could think of for the previous question:

1. He is often angry.
2. He often is angry.
3. Often he is angry.
4. He is angry often.

We can put an adverb after the verb (1), before the verb (2), at the beginning of the sentence (3), or at the end of the sentence (4). For the rest of this module I'm going to ignore the beginning-of-sentence and end-of-sentence adverbs (3 and 4) because sentence-level adverbs are a bit different than verb-level adverbs. For now, let's just focus on (1) and (2). What these show is: in English, you can put an adverb right before a verb, or right after a verb.

Now let's look at another sentence:

He eats pie.

Where can we put "often" in this sentence? Does this cause any problems for my previous generalization ("you can put an adverb right before a verb, or right after a verb")?

In the previous question, you should have noticed that saying He often eats pie is ok, but *He eats often pie is not.

Thus, my previous generalization ("you can put an adverb before or after a verb) was not right. We can't put often right after eats, in the example above.

Try to state a rule about where adverbs can go in English, with respect to their verbs. Keep in mind the distinction between main verbs and auxiliary verbs (which kind of verb is is, and which kind of verb is eats?). Don't search for a rule online; the purpose of this activity is for you to try thinking of a rule yourself. I don't care if your answer is correct or not, I just care that your answer demonstrates your own thinking.