Adjectives are noun modifiers. Adjectives give specific information about the nouns in your writing. Adjectives make your writing more interesting. Adjectives bring your writing to life.
The boy and his mother ate food at the restaurant.
This sentence gives us basic information, but it doesn’t paint much of a picture in our mind. Take a look at the next sentence.
The crabby six-year-old boy and his exhausted, gray-haired mother ate Italian food at the small, neighborhood restaurant.
The second sentence gives much more detail. Each noun – boy, mother, food, restaurant – has one or two adjectives that help bring the scene to life. Adjectives are important. They make your writing interesting, vivid, and alive.
English is a rich language, and it offers many adjective choices. When you write, take the time to choose the best adjective for each noun. Here are two things to be aware of:
Don’t use boring adjectives. Be specific.
Certain adjectives are boring adjectives. Good, bad, small, big, ugly, pretty are all boring adjectives. When you use these describing words, you haven’t added much definition to your writing. Work to find the most exact adjective so that your meaning comes across to your reader.
When you write good, do you really mean well-behaved, like a good boy? Do you mean tasty, like a good meal? Or do you mean entertaining, like a good book or a good movie?
When you write bad, do you mean naughty? Or rotten? Awful? Disgusting? Harmful?
See how many more interesting words there are for these boring adjectives? Take the time to always find the best adjective for each of your nouns.
Be careful with word connotation.
Connotation is the subtle “underneath” meaning of a word. A word can have a positive connotation or a negative connotation. Think about the word cheap. Cheap describes a person who doesn’t like to spend money. Now think about the word frugal. Frugal also describes a person who doesn’t like to spend money.
A cheap man is someone like Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol – a cruel penny pincher who is unwilling to share his money with those in need. We would call him cheap. Cheap has a negative connotation. We think less of Scrooge because he hangs onto his money so tightly.
The word frugal has a more positive connotation. If a man is frugal, it means he is careful with his money and does not spend it foolishly. Most of us would rather be called frugal than cheap. When you are choosing an adjective, be sure to choose an adjective that has the connotation – either good or bad – that you are hoping to convey in your writing.
Adjectives make our writing interesting and exciting and fun to read. Adjectives also make our writing more specific and exact. As you work to improve your writing, make friends with the many and varied adjectives available in our language. Almost every noun in your writing can be enriched by the addition of an adjective. Just be careful to choose a strong adjective that has the connotation you are hoping to impart.