How to Spot Descriptive Adjectives

An adjective describes a noun or pronoun. There are descriptive adjectives, superlative adjectives and demonstrative adjectives. Descriptive adjectives can be simple, compound or proper. In order to use a descriptive adjective, you need to know the order in which they're used. You use opinion adjectives before types such as age, size and color.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Use simple adjectives when you are describing quality. Examples are "This is a safe home," "I come from a happy family" and "She is a beautiful woman." Although you can also use compound adjectives to describe quality, simple adjectives are commonly used.

2. Decide to use compound adjectives when you want to describe something in a variety of words. Examples are "the self-centered boy," "the half-dead woman" and "the left-handed girl."

3. Use common nouns, such as religions, nations and regions, to make proper adjectives. Examples of proper adjectives are "We are eating Italian food," "The Roman Catholic church" and "The American student went to Paris."

4. Add some of the following suffixes to a word and make it an adjective. Some examples of these suffixes are "al," "able," "y," "ous" and "ful." The following are examples of adjectives using these suffixes, "ornamental," "capable," "shaggy," "joyous" and "beautiful."

5. Learn to put a comma between descriptive adjectives. When describing something with multiple adjectives you need to insert a comma between each of the words, except the last two. This is an example, the "tall, beautiful, blonde woman."

Tips & Warnings

• Verbs, adverbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections make up the eight parts of the English language's speech.

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