Do you remember what adjectives are for? Describing nouns! In English, these are generally found before the noun. So, if you see a word before a noun and it seems to be giving more information about that noun, it’s almost certainly an adjective.

Last time, we talked about the first seven types of adjectives, because trying to shoehorn twelve types of adjectives into one blog post seemed like an overwhelming proposition. These two blogs are also in no way comprehensive. We could spend months dissecting every single tiny difference between adjectives. These are, however, the most common types that you will come across in your writing.

Descriptive adjectives: This seems redundant, doesn’t it? The reason it feels redundant is because this is the most common type of adjective, so it’s doing the very general job of simply giving your nouns more description. This type of adjective is generally giving a physical description:

The spiky porcupine raced toward me.

However, this is a good time to go back to our first lesson about descriptive words, where I explained that it’s best to use these judiciously. Oftentimes, descriptive adjectives are the adjectives that we tend to overuse the most.

For instance, in the above example, “spiky” is redundant. We all know that porcupines are spiky. If you wanted to emphasize that the porcupine is aggressive, you can do that in this way:

The porcupine raced toward me, its spines flared and ready to launch.

This emphasizes the danger far better than simply telling us that the porcupine was spiky. Descriptive adjectives are not always redundant; for instance, “Susan’s brown hair” actually gives us information about Susan’s appearance we would not have otherwise.

When it comes to these adjectives, simply use your discernment to determine whether or not the adjective is necessary.

Limiting adjectives: an adjective that limits a noun, making it more specific. Depending on the style of grammar you’re using, this kind of adjective includes possessive pronouns (like my, their, her, his, etc.), articles (an, a, the, and variations of them such as these, that, this, those), and even numbers.

This kind of adjective essentially gives you more information about the noun by restricting its description rather than by giving you any actual description of its traits. For example, “I need some food,” “This cat is crazy,” “Naomi never met her grandma,” “Grab Devon those two books from the coffee table.”

Limiting adjectives are a bit vague, but the more you study it, the more they seem to just pop up everywhere. Sometimes these are useful, but other times, they can cause some confusion.

For instance, in the last example I gave, if there are more than two books on the coffee table, how are we supposed to know which one to give to Devon? Make sure when you use these that your adjectives are actually describing your nouns specifically enough to make sense to your reader.

Participial adjectives: a participle that’s being used as an adjective. This isn’t much help to you if you don’t know what a participle is, is it?

A participle is a verb form that is used to create many different tenses, such as past, present, etc. For example, “I’m running to the store” uses a present participle to tell you what I am currently in the act of doing. “I had to run to the store” uses a past participle to tell you what I did earlier.

Usually these verbs will end in “ing” or “ed,” however, as in my second example, there are many irregular participles that do not end that way. This form of word may require some research fairly frequently at first.

When these kinds of words are used to describe a noun instead of an action, these participles become participial adjectives, such as “coloring book,” “cracked windshield,” “jumping spider,” etc. Once you know how to identify a participle, it’s quite easy to notice them being used as adjectives all over the place!

Interrogative adjectives: an adjective that helps us ask for more information about a specific noun. After a fairly difficult adjective, this is quite simple. There are only three interrogative adjectives:

whose

which

what

When using these adjectives, you’re generally asking for more information about a noun. “Whose wallet is this?” “What stadium are we going to?” “Which room am I staying in?”

If you see one of these three words describing a noun and asking for more information, it’s probably an interrogative adjective.

Distributive adjectives: an adjective that separates a group into its individual members. Some of the most common distributive adjectives are each, every, either, neither, any, and both. When used in a sentence, these generally describe something happening to each individual member of a group. For example,

When every student passed their Spanish test, they got a pizza party.

In this scenario, we’re separating the class into individual students who each passed their Spanish test. Rather than being a mass of children, we’re thinking of this class as individual people.

I know this was a lot of information to take in all at once! Come back whenever you need to for a refresher. And if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment so I can clear things up for you. Next time, we’ll finally dive into adverbs, the words that describe verbs. See you then!