Hello everyone. Welcome to another #theorythursday. Last week I talked about the concept of suspending one’s disbelief because I was so inspired by seeing The Lion King in the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre. Check that out if you haven’t already.
Today I am continuing on with my #backtobasics series. I’ve already talked about verbs and nouns, so be sure to read those discussions too if grammar is something that you want to brush up on.
Today I am going to be talking about adjectives. So let’s dive in.
What is an adjective?
An adjective is a word that is used when an author wants to describe a noun. When I was talking about verbs, I said that the easiest way to explain what a verb is would be to say that a verb is a doing word. I would say that the easiest way to explain what an adjective is would be to say that an adjective is a describing word so in a sentence, the adjective would come before the noun.
I’m going to make up an example.
“The beautiful necklace sparkled in the case.”
In this sentence, the necklace is the noun, because a noun is a person, place or a thing. A necklace is a thing, so the adjective in this sentence is the word “beautiful”, because this word is describing the necklace.
Other examples of adjectives can be found in sentences such as:
“The red door opened with a loud creak.”
In this sentence, the word “red” is the adjective because this tells us that the door, the noun, is red.
An adjective can also be used when an author is describing how many there are of something.
An example of this can be found in a sentence such as “It looked like there were a thousand stars in the sky.”
In this sentence, the word “thousand” is the adjective because it is telling us how many stars there are, and stars are things, so the word “stars” is the noun.
Why is it important to know what an adjective is?
I say the same thing every time when I am talking about basic aspects of grammar such as nouns, verbs, and now adjectives too. It is important to understand these basics because they can be found so often in writing. When you are a student, it is important to know what these terms mean so that you can recognise nouns, verbs, and adjectives in passages of writing. I also think that refreshing one’s memory on certain terms can be really helpful in general, because when we learn the basics in school, it can often be assumed later that we remember everything perfectly, but sometimes that isn’t the case, which is why I’ve decided to break things down in a back to basics approach.
This has been Theory Thursday. Happy Friday Eve.
Kate xo.
Katelovesliterature.com 