Adjectives

What are adjectives?

Adjectives are the words we use to add attributes to nouns or noun phrases in order to describe or modify them. They can describe the quality of a nounFor example, good dog., or the quantityFor example, many dogs.. Therefore, descriptive words like colors, size, textures, and tones are adjectives, such as big, soft, blue, funny, etc. Numbers or numerical descriptors are also adjectives, such as many, few, twelve, infinite, etc.

Why use adjectives?

Adjectives are important in writing because they essentially make nouns more specific. For example, if you write “flower,” the reader may imagine something completely different than what you had in mind.

However, if you write “small, blue, three-petaled flower,” the reader can now clearly conceptualize what you are referring to.

How to spot adjectives

Adjectives are usually easy to find, because in English, they come right before the nouns they are modifying.

• Example → “Alex had a very beautiful dress.”
• Incorrect → “Alex had a very dress beautiful”
• Incorrect → “Alex had a beautiful very dress.”

If we have multiple adjectives, we can separate them with conjunctions like “and” or commas, such as:

• Example → “Alex had a very beautiful and long dress.”
• Example → “Alex had a very long, beautiful dress.”

These examples also contain an adverb, “very.” It is important to note that adjectives do not modify verbs, adverbs, or other adjectives.

Adjective order

When using multiple adjectives, it can get tricky to figure out what order to write them in. Luckily, there is a standard rule of thumb for this order! It is as follows: