Hyphenation, Part 2

Yesterday I talked about the lack of a hyphen where there should have been one. Today, I saw a hyphen where there shouldn't be one. In an article in a nutrition newsletter, the author talked about "organically-grown produce." Because organically is an adverb, there shouldn't be a hyphen. Usually, you can tell adverbs by their -ly suffix. But not all words ending in -ly are adverbs (for instance, family), and not all adverbs end in -ly.

If we took "organically grown produce" and made it into a sentence, it would be "The produce is organically grown." Grown is the verb, and organically describes how it was grown. This is the trick to identifying an adverb; it tells us how something was done. However, this is a simplification, and adverbs are much more complicated than that. One of these days, we'll talk more about adverbs.