Writing Enhancement: Adjectives
Use strong adjectives to enrich your essays
We all know what adjectives are. They are words put in front of nouns to describe them. But are they important? They are in fact very important to any essay because they make your essay interesting. Without adjectives, your essay can be quite boring and examiners just can’t find a good reason to give you a high mark.
Let’s look at this example.
Passing that door, I felt like I had entered another realm. The room was
enclosed by four walls coated with sponges. The air was warm, carrying a bad
whiff. It pressed on me like fog on rainy days and smeared a coat of grease on
my skin. A microphone stood solitarily on the stage. Under the lighting, the rim
of the wind screen shot flashes of rays like a dagger. I continued to follow the
lead like a prisoner. I have no thoughts other than replaying the fact that I was
one step closer to the path of my decapitation. My head started to throb and
dizziness devoured me like sea swell in a storm.
This descriptive paragraph is actually quite good by itself. It tells us the narrator is scared. But if we want to add ‘color’ and ‘spice’ to it to make it great, we want to work on adding some adjectives. But not just any adjectives - strong, effective adjectives. Notice the use of the word ‘bad’ highlighted above? Many students use a lot of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to describe feelings, events, and things which just isn’t strong enough. If we google the synonyms of the word ‘good’, it comes up with about 20 lines of synonyms – use them.
Where should we add adjectives?
Scan through your writing to see whether all the nouns are showing a complete picture of the ideas you want to convey. Add adjectives to incomplete ideas and where the noun is plain and boring.
Let’s look at the same example after adding adjectives.
Passing that double layered door, I felt like I had entered another realm. The room was enclosed by four, depressingly plain walls coated with thick sponges. The air was stifling and tremendously heavy, carrying a sour and acrid whiff. It pressed on me like thick fog on rainy days and smeared a sickening coat of unctuous grease on my skin. A microphone stood solitarily on the stage. Under the harsh white lighting, the rim of the silver wind screen shot stinging flashes of long rays like a keen dagger. I continued to follow the lead like a death row prisoner. Palpitating and trembling, I have no thoughts other than replaying the fact that I was one step closer to the path of my decapitation. My head started to throb and dizziness devoured me like sea swell in a storm.
Be a judge to your own writing.
One problem we often see is students do not evaluate their own writing. This may waste all the effort of planning and writing. If you don’t step back and analyse what you have written, you will never know how unskillful or excellent a writer you are.
Adding strong and effective adjectives is something worth remembering especially for IGCSE students preparing for their story / descriptive coursework.