The Grammar Rule for Well v. Good

It was just another day in the office. I was at my desk, typing away on some document when our department’s co-chair walked out of her office and began talking to our main secretary about a problem that had arisen.  I wasn’t paying much attention at all, when all of the sudden I heard someone utter “but she feels badly about it.” At first I cringed. But then I laughed. All I could imagine was a girl walking around trying to feel things and not being able to feel them well. My little dream had me laughing out loud in the middle of our office.

This commonly confused rule has had teachers, students, and the general public spinning around in circles not sure what to do about it for years. When you take apart the structure of these sentences, the main verbs ”am” and “feel” are actually functioning as linking verbs. Linking verbs are different from action verbs. Action verbs connotate actions, like “run” or “kick.” If you want to describe an action verb, you use an adverb: “They run well.”  However, according to the Chicago Manual of Style, a linking verb “links the subject to an equivalent word in the sentence—a predicate pronoun, predicate noun, or predicate adjective” (174).  Thus, whatever follows a linking verb, must be a pronoun, noun, or an adjective, not an adverb.

Similar to “I feel badly,” the confusion with “I am good” is situated in the etymology of the word “well.”  The Oxford English Dictionary reveals that well is both an adverb (meaning to do something well) and a predicate adjective (meaning healthy). However, as we discovered earlier, linking verbs can only take predicate adjectives—not adverbs.  Thus, when people respond to the question of “How are you?” with “I am well,” they are syntactically correct. However, it is only semantically correct if they actually meant to express that they are healthy; if they were trying to say they were having a generally good day, they should have used the predicate adjective “good” and said “I am good.”

“Linking” verbs are also confusing because they can function as action verbs. In the sentence I mentioned before, where my coworker misused the words “she felt badly,” the verb “feel” can be an action verb. That’s why I started cracking up.  Because when the adverb “badly” is used instead of the adjective “bad,” it signals the verb is an action verb—that she literally was walking around trying to feel things with her hands. What she meant to say was “she felt bad about the situation,” not badly.

Many people mix up using adverbs for adjectives because they seem to sound better, more sophisticated. Because it seems to sound better and there is such widespread confusion on the topic, people often think the correct form is the adverb, and they use it to avoid criticism or judgement from others. Ironically, by doing this, they are in fact using the semantically incorrect response that will probably solicit judgement from those grammarrians that realize how this rule actually functions. So, the next time you feel pressured to say “I am well,” you can hold your head high and know that saying “I am good” is not anything to be ashamed of, in fact, it’s the most sophisticated response afterall.