How to Use Adjectives

An adjective is a word that provides information about the quality or quantity of a noun or pronoun. There are multiple types of adjectives, but they all serve the purpose of describing something. Articles are also classified as adjectives, as they are words that modify nouns.

Types of adjectives

Descriptive adjectives describe nouns or pronouns. They provide additional information about a thing.

Here, the word “pretty” is a descriptive adjective. It describes the girl’s doll.

Descriptive adjectives often convey essential information. “A system to detect the response” is vague and not particularly informative. “An adaptive system to detect the transient response” is much more specific and thus more informative.

Quantitative adjectives describe the quantity of a noun. This quantity can be a precise number.

However, quantitative adjectives also include words such as “whole” or “complete.”

Proper adjectives are simply the adjective form of proper nouns. Proper nouns are specific names and are always capitalized. Nationalities, languages, institutions, and schools of thought all fall under proper nouns.

Korean, Harvard, and French are all proper nouns. In this context, however, they are being used as adjectives.

Demonstrative adjectives refer directly to a noun.

These adjectives must always precede the noun they describe.

Commonly used demonstrative adjectives: that, this, those, these

Possessive adjectives indicate the person who owns or possesses a given noun.

Like demonstrative adjectives, possessive adjectives must also always precede the noun they describe.

Commonly used possessive adjectives: my, your, his, her, our, their, its

Interrogative adjectives indicate questions.

There are just three interrogative adjectives: what, which, whose

Indefinite adjectives provide unspecific information about a noun.

In the sentence above, the author is not giving specific numbers or data on the association between the subgroups.

Commonly used indefinite adjectives: some, every, each, most, several, many

Compound adjectives are often compound words that describe nouns, and the separate words that make up the adjective are connected with a hyphen.

However, compound adjectives can also be a simple combination of words, typically blocked off with quotation marks. This is not often used in academic writing but is fairly common in colloquial contexts.

Degree of Adjectives

The form of an adjective changes when it shows comparison. There are three degrees of comparison: positive, comparative, and superlative. Take for example the adjective “bright.”

Not all adjectives have comparative and superlative forms that are separate words. The comparative and superlative forms of many adjectives are created simply by adding the words “more” or “most.” One example of this is the adjective “brilliant.”

Using Adjectives in Academic Writing

In general, academic writing should be as concise as possible. This means that adjectives should be used only when they provide necessary information. Using too many adjectives can make a sentence wordy and difficult to follow.

Here, “three-dimensional” is a compound adjective that conveys essential information about the developed model. Omitting this adjective would remove important information.

This is the same sentence but with additional adjectives. “Highly informative” and “computer” do not provide much more information about the developed model; they do little more than lengthen the sentence. The same goes for “antibacterial” and “insect”; they make the sentence unnecessarily long. The information provided by these two adjectives would be best conveyed by another clause.