Back to Basics: Adjectives

Let’s ease our way back into the Back to Basics series with a couple lessons on modifiers, or words that describe other words. These come in two varieties: adjectives and adverbs. Today we will focus on adjectives.

Adjectives are handy words that help add description, tone, and personality to your writing. Like most everything to do with writing and grammar, the better you understand them and the rules surrounding them, the more useful they are to your work.

Adjectives are words that modify a noun or pronoun. So if you want to describe a person, place, thing, or idea, you would use an adjective. They can come before or after the nouns or pronouns they are modifying, and sometimes, they might even be separated by a verb.

In the examples below, the adjectives are shown in bold and italics, and the noun or pronoun it is modifying is shown in bold.

The dog played with a green ball.

I don’t like rainy days.

Jared loves loud music.

Papa’s house is blue.

The movie is scary.

You can use several adjectives in your sentences to paint a clearer picture, or you can even use a few adjectives to describe one noun or pronoun.

Again, I will show you some examples with the adjectives shown in bold italics and the nouns or pronouns in bold. If more than one noun or pronoun is being modified, I will note which adjectives are modifying which noun or pronoun by making them the same color.

The big brown dog played with a green ball.

The old cat likes to chase fat squirrels.

She hurried across the cold wood floor.

The music I like is fast, loud, and fun.

Did you notice something about the times more than one adjective was used to describe a word? Sometimes they are separated by a comma or the word “and,” but sometimes they are not. Why is that?

Coordinate Adjectives

When you have two or more adjectives modifying the same noun or pronoun, they are referred to as coordinate adjectives. Most of the time, coordinate adjectives are separated by a comma or the word “and.” However, there are times where although an adjective is modifying a noun, it becomes a single unit, and the other adjectives describe the unit as a whole.

How do you tell the difference between two or more coordinate adjectives and an adjective before a noun unit? One way is to try reading the sentence with “and” between the two adjectives. If it makes sense that way, you need to either keep the and or replace it with a comma. If it does not make sense with and between the two, you are looking at a noun unit being modified by an adjective.

Take one of the examples above. Cold and wood floor sounds odd, but fast and loud and fun music sounds perfectly fine.

Another way is to consider the order of adjectives in English. This is a rule us native speakers aren’t usually taught because using this order just “sounds right” to us, but those who are learning English as a second language have to study to get down.

determiner - observation or opinion - size - shape - age - color - origin - material - qualifier

If the adjective closest to the noun is from one of those last three categories, or several of them, they will make a noun unit. You can have an American cotton day dress, but it would sound odd to say American and cotton and day dress.

Adjectives using Ordinate and Cardinal Numbers

What about if you need to use both an ordinate and cardinal number to describe a noun? Is there a particular order to that, or can you place them any which way?

Well, first off, let’s define ordinate and cardinal numbers. An ordinate number is one that signifies the order of something. First, second, and last are all examples of ordinate numbers. Cardinal numbers count how many there are of something.

When you need both an ordinate number and a cardinal number to describe the same thing, always place the ordinate number first.

Please read the first three chapters in your book for homework tonight.

I’m still missing the last five items from my list.

And there you have a basic overview on adjectives and how to use them. As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to post them in the comments below, and I will try my best to answer them within 24 hours.

Also, you can find the elementary version of the lesson here.

Please come back January 28th for a lesson on adverbs.