Adjectives
Adjectives describe nouns by answering one of these three questions: What kind is it? How many are there? Which one is it? An adjective can be a single word, a phrase, or a clause. Check out these examples:
What kind is it?
Dan decided that the fuzzy green bread would make an unappetizing sandwich.
What kind of bread? Fuzzy and green! What kind of sandwich? Unappetizing!
A friend with a fat wallet will never want for weekend shopping partners.
What kind of friend? One with money to spend!
A towel that is still warm from the dryer is more comforting than a hot fudge sundae.
What kind of towel? One right out of the dryer.
How many are there?
Seven hungry space aliens slithered into the diner and ordered two dozen vanilla milkshakes.
How many hungry space aliens? Seven!
The students, five freshmen and six sophomores, braved Dr. Ribley's killer calculus exam.
How many students? Eleven!
The disorganized pile of books, which contained seventeen overdue volumes from the library and five unread class texts, blocked the doorway in Eli's dorm room.
How many books? Twenty-two!
Which one is it?
The most unhealthy item from the cafeteria is the steak sub, which will slime your hands with grease.
Which item from the cafeteria? Certainly not the one that will lower your cholesterol!
The cockroach eyeing your cookie has started to crawl this way.
Which cockroach? Not the one crawling up your leg but the one who wants your cookie!
The students who neglected to prepare for Mrs. Mauzy's English class hide in the cafeteria rather than risk their instructor's wrath.
Which students? Not the good students but the lazy slackers.
Know how to punctuate a series of adjectives.
To describe a noun fully, you might need to use two or more adjectives. Sometimes a series of adjectives requires commas, but sometimes it doesn't. What makes the difference?
If the adjectives are coordinate, you must use commas between them. If, on the other hand, the adjectives are noncoordinate, no commas are necessary. How do you tell the difference?
Coordinate adjectives can pass one of two tests. When you reorder the series or when you insert and between them, they still make sense. Look at the following example:
The tall, creamy, delicious milkshake melted on the counter while the inattentive waiter flirted with the pretty cashier.
Now read this revision:
The delicious, tall, creamy milkshake melted on the counter while the inattentive waiter flirted with the pretty cashier.
The series of adjectives still makes sense even though the order has changed. And if you insert and between the adjectives, you still have a logical sentence:
The tall and creamy and delicious milkshake melted on the counter while the inattentive waiter flirted with the pretty cashier.
Noncoordinate adjectives do not make sense when you reorder the series or when you insert and between them. Check out this example:
Jeanne's two fat Siamese cats hog the electric blanket on cold winter evenings.
If you switch the order of the adjectives, the sentence becomes gibberish:
Fat Siamese two Jeanne's cats hog the electric blanket on cold winter evenings.