Where does 'deliberately' and 'physically' go in my sentence? I wrote it like this:
A) Physical abuse is when a child is deliberately physically hurt or injured.
I also tried:
B) Physical abuse is when a child is physically hurt or injured deliberately.
The reason you may be having trouble is that it often sounds awkward to have two consecutive adverbs in a sentence. Also, it is often awkward to have two adverbs modifying the same verb, no matter where they are placed in the sentence.
So in your example, it doesn't matter if you put the "deliberately" before "physically" or at the end of the sentence. Either way it's going to sound clunky.
I recommend instead you rewrite the sentence to avoid using "deliberately physically". For example:
Physical abuse is when someone deliberately causes physical harm or injury to a child.
Physical abuse is when someone causes deliberate, physical harm or injury to a child.
This sentence can be further improved by picking either "harm" or "injury" but not both, since they mean much the same thing. Also, in this context "intentional" sounds better to me than "deliberate".
Physical abuse is defined as causing a child intentional, physical harm.
In sentence A, you could place "deliberately" at the end of the sentence and it would sound fine. Rarely in English do you see two adverbs ending in -ly placed next to each other. So essentially sentence B is the more correct version.
P.S: just curious, but what language is your native language?
