He knew the inchoate sharp excitement of hot dandelions in young earth in July, of watermelons bedded in sweet hay, inside a farmer's covered wagon of cantaloupe and crated peaches and the scent of orange rind, bitter-sweet, before a fire of coals.

He remembered yet the East India Tea House at the Fair, the sandalwood, the turbans, and the robes, the cool interior and the smell of India tea and he had felt now the nostalgic thrill of dew-wet mornings in Spring, the cherry scent, the cool clarion earth, the wet loaminess of the garden, the pungent breakfast smells and the floating snow of blossoms. Some people would argue that words that are part of a name like ' East India Tea House are not really adjectival and that possessive nouns father's, farmer's are not technically adjectives, but we've included them in our analysis of Wolfe's text. 69.) Adjectives are highlighted in this color participles, verb forms acting as adjectives, are highlighted in this blue.

It is your job as a writer to create beauty and excitement and interest, and when you simply insist on its presence without showing it to your reader well, you're convincing no one.Ĭonsider the uses of modifiers in this adjectivally rich paragraph from Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel. Be particularly cautious in your use of adjectives that don't have much to say in the first place: interesting, beautiful, lovely, exciting. Let your broad-shouldered verbs and nouns do the hard work of description. If an adjective clause is stripped of its subject and verb, the resulting modifier becomes an Adjective Phrase: He is the man who is keeping my family in the poorhouse.īefore getting into other usage considerations, one general note about the use or over-use of adjectives: Adjectives are frail don't ask them to do more work than they should. My sister, who is much older than I am, is an engineer. If a group of words containing a subject and verb acts as an adjective, it is called an Adjective Clause. The Articles a, an, and the are adjectives. Adjectives are words that describe or modify another person or thing in the sentence.

What is a proper adjective