
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. Summary: What are Proper Adjectives?ĭefine proper adjective: the definition of a proper adjective is an adjective that derives from a proper noun and begins with a capital letter.Adjectives are words that describe or modify another person or thing in the sentence. However, the proper adjective itself is still capitalized.Įxamples of hyphenated proper adjectives:ĭecide if the following should be capitalized (proper adjective) or lower-case (common adjective). When a proper adjective has a prefix, the prefix itself is never capitalized (unless it is the first word of a sentence, of course). A proper noun is the name of a particular person, place, or thing. The concept of common noun and proper noun is similar to that of common adjective and proper adjective.Ī common noun is any person, place or thing. the adjective “French” is a proper adjective because it is derived from the proper noun.the adjective “cheddar” is a common adjective.Proper adjectives are derived from proper nouns. This is because they are everyday words, not derived from proper nouns.
