There are many different aspects to the English language but let’s start with a few of the basics. These are all critical elements to writing anything for school or professional life, including writing anything from a literature review for a class, developing and discussing a hypothesis or introducing your research for work or personal matters.

Adjectives are words in sentences that are used to describe and are often used to tell readers more about what the noun or the subject of the sentence is discussing. Adjectives do not always stand alone in a sentence and can be used in multiples throughout a sentence. Generally, although adjectives can appear anywhere in a sentence, they are often found just before the noun or sentence subject(s) they are referring to. While this is not a hard rule that is always present, many basic sentences do follow such a format.

The following are a few examples of adjectives in sentences that will highlight a few important points. You will notice that all adjectives are in bold lettering and upon closer inspection, you will notice that the bold adjectives are being used to describe the main subject (or subjects) of the sentences in question.

The girl took her blue ball to the playground.
The tall, lean man had a face that was long and grizzled.
The website offering extended definitions of adjectives was very simple but easy to navigate and full of useful information.

All three of these sentences with the bold adjectives range in their level of complexity. For the first sentence, the only adjective present is being used to describe (which is the main function of adjectives) the ball. If we wanted to get more descriptive in this sentence, it would be perfectly acceptable to add another adjective, say for example before the word “playground” that would describe what the playground was like. Did you notice that the first two sentences contained the adjective just before the subject they were referring to? That is quite common and often sounds the most natural when spoken.

As demonstrated above, there are no rules about using adjectives multiple times in a sentence and this is demonstrated even further in the second and third sentences. Notice that the last two examples use several adjectives, but they all describe different elements of the sentence as they refer to different subjects. The last example of adjectives, for example, has adjectives that describe not just the main subject of the sentence, which is the website, they also describe how easy it is navigate (thus clarifying a verb) and also describe what the information is like.

You might be wondering why the word “easy” is not in bold in the last sentence since it appears to be a descriptive word. While this is a word that is describing an element of the sentence, the word “easy” is not describing a subject of the sentence, it is rather modifying the meaning of the verb navigate. When you have a descriptive word that looks like an adjective, make sure to double-check that the subject is not actually a verb since that will mean that what you have is not an adjective, but an adverb.
There are various types of adjectives that apply to different situations you will encounter as you learn more about adjectives and proper grammar. Below are a few important types of adjectives you might want to learn more about so you can help decide what is and is not an adjective and how the adjectives should be properly used in sentences:

Extended Definition of Attributive Adjectives : What is an Attributive Adjective?
Part of the term “attributive” means that something has attributes that are being applied. Attributes are like characteristics; they are aspects of a particular thing, place, or person and the perfect way to reveal attributes is through the use of adjectives, since the goal of attribution is to describe and quantify. Attributive adjectives are the easiest adjectives to identify because they simply come right before the noun in question and directly apply to that subject distinctly. Here are a few examples with the attributive adjectives in bold.

She had long braids that hung across her freckled shoulders.
He took a deep breath and ran across the green meadow.

These are quite simple, see? All you need to do to determine if an adjective is attributive is to see if it comes in right before the noun it is describing. Remember that this can sometimes be tricky if you’re not careful and you could actually find yourself staring at an adjective rather than attributive adjective, predictive adjectives, absolute adjectives, substantive adjectives, Proper adjectives.

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