I saw this in a PowerPoint slide yesterday.
Problem:
The writer used an adjective where an adverb was required.
Explanation:
An adjective such as “exact” must be converted to an adverb so that it can modify another adjective.
For example, it’s incorrect to say or write “the definite green blouse”; the correct form is “the definitely green blouse”. We must convert the adjective “definite” to the adverb “definitely” to modify correctly the adjective “green” in this example.
Similarly, it’s incorrect to say or write “the exact same thing”. The correct but rarely used form is “the exactly same thing”; the correct and more commonly used form is “exactly the same thing”.
For fun, I searched Google for each of the following phrases (with the quotation marks) and got the indicated numbers of matches:
- “the exact same thing” — 555,000 matches
- “the exactly same thing” — 762 matches
- “exactly the same thing” — 527,000 matches
This tells me that Web authors have written the phrase incorrectly by a ratio of 1.05:1, which is not good!
Solution:
“This is exactly the same thing.”