Five-car pile-up on the adjective highway

[gwyn]

Last time I did one of these, I talked about adverbs and why I think advice such as Stephen King’s “don’t use adverbs” crap is so specious. I mentioned that when used judiciously and not as a weak excuse to get out of doing the work of showing, not telling, adverbs and adjectives add color and texture to writing. So now let’s talk about the other half of the equation, adjectives. Few people really have trouble with adjectives, and fortunately I haven’t seen anyone advocating a wholesale ban on their use — yet.

Most of us get the basics: Adjectives are words that modify nouns or pronouns (whereas adverbs modify verbs, adjective, or other adverbs). Adjectives include classes of words such as color (red, purple), evaluative (beautiful, repulsive), varying types of sizes and measures (enormous, long, round — is it hot in here? Sorry), and esoteric things like religion and nationality (British, Jewish, Catholic, Inuit). There’s even a type of adjective that’s a noun/adjective, where a noun modifies another noun, like tree modifies house in tree house or kitchen does table in kitchen table. But let’s not worry about that last one because that’s not where confusion reigns.

So, since we mostly get the concept of adjectives — we use them every time we describe our pretty BSOs in fanfic, for instance — where is the confusion? Mostly in how to punctuate them if they’re used in a string, and what order to place them in. That sounds weird, I know. But it’s something I see a lot of in fanfic when we want to talk about, for instance, the dark dank scary hall that Harry Potter is walking down, or something like that. How do you know which order the adjectives should go in? Believe it or not, English has a kind of pecking order for adjectives, and those of us who grow up speaking English learn this sort of by accident (although judging from much fanfic, many people never do really learn it). It’s one of the harder things to teach in English as a Second Language. But if adjectives are piling up in front of your noun, how do you know what arrangement they should have? This is the most common manner they will appear in, stolen from Diana Hacker’s most excellent Writer’s Reference. It’s by no means a hard and fast rule, but it’s a pretty good place to start.

The article or other noun marker:
a, an, the, her, Fraser’s, three, many, some, etc.

Evaluative word:
Pretty, tasty, ugly, disgusting, attractive, etc.

Size:
Huge, gigantic, tiny, little

Length or shape:
Long, square, short

Age:
New, old, young, antique

Color:
Silver, gold, carmine, purple

Nationality:
Venezuelan, Swedish, Transylvanian, Chinese

Religion:
Muslim, Catholic, Protestant

Material:
Wood, silver, polyester, iron

Noun/adjective
And then the noun modified

It’s best not to throw more than two or three adjectives at a noun. You don’t want a big five-car adjective pile-up for the reader, because it tends to not only weaken your description but it can get kind of comical. And as with adverbs, overuse tends to make people laugh at fanfic and other amateur writing. So keep it simple:

Spike and Dru enjoyed making a meal of the plump young Hungarian soccer team they met on the train.
Buffy wore a beautiful antique silver cross around her neck.
Irons had a fascinating old Renaissance painting of a woman wielding the witchblade.
Blair had a collection of moldy ancient Peruvian manuscripts.

So once you figure out what string of words you want to use, how do you punctuate them? I have seen some really nasty arguments about this, so sadly, there’s no hard and fast rule here, either. It’s made worse by the fact that Brits don’t always commafy everything the way Yanks do. But generally, if the adjectives you’re using are what’s called coordinate (they modify your noun separately), then you want commas: Dawn has become a strong, confident, intelligent young woman. You can tell they’re coordinate if they can be joined using and (strong and confident and intelligent), or if they can be scrambled without affecting your sentence (intelligent, confident, strong).

If two or more adjectives don’t modify the noun separately, then they’re cumulative: Four big ugly vampires came toward Xander. The adjectives here sort of piggyback on each other, with each word modifying a larger word group (this is where your list comes in). Ugly modifies vampires, big modifies ugly vampires, and four modifies big ugly vampires. Since you can’t throw an and in there (four and big and ugly vampires), and we can’t scramble them (big four ugly), we’ve got ourselves cumulative adjectives, by gum, so no commas. And also, go here to one of my comma posts or here , and there’s more info about how to use the commas when you have long strings of modifying words.

In truth, if you don’t do this right, it’s not the end of the world. There are folks who will beat you up about the punctuation or the placement, but I think just the fact that you don’t overdo the use of adjectives or adverbs is the crucial thing. Pick judiciously, order them in a way that makes sense, and you’ve got most of the hard work down.

Comments

[umbo.livejournal.com]

Okay, I would write "Four big, ugly vampires." Which would sort of fit your rules, because while you can't say "four and big and ugly," you can say "big and ugly." But the truth is, I've *never* seen this stuff explained anywhere before, so I really appreciate this post--I always thought the rule was, if you used more than two adjectives in a row, you used commas, because it was a list.

[paratti.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this:)

[kita0610.livejournal.com]

Personally, I think adjectives and adverbs both have their place in writing: limited. Too much tell, not enough show. Instead of saying 'big, ugly vampires', I'd rather have a description that made me *see* them. That's the line between good writing and *good* writing. There is no class of words which should be banned- with the possible exception of clinical medical terms in erotic stories ;}, but I think spare is key.

[mlyn.livejournal.com]

Danke, sweetie.