On April 6, 2024, Kasie and Rex took on adjectives. Here are the show notes:

Theme for the day

Describe It To Me

Agenda

• Quick Catch Up
• Adjectives: Underrated?
• Adjectives: Overused?
• Do’s and Don’ts

listen to the podcast

Segment 1

After we fully explained beginnings last week and kept coming up with the benign suggestions of “make it interesting” and “show don’t tell” we figured we ought to dive deeper into the bricks of the “show” universe. Those bricks are adjectives and they’re used to describe nouns and pronouns.

Adjectives are modifiers. They modify a noun to make it more specific. House becomes tiny house. Cat becomes lazy cat. Grandfather becomes grumpy old man. Full explanation here.

So when should a writer use them? Like all things, there’s a blog about that. Find it here. But in general, here’s the suggested guidelines:

• Brevity – don’t over do it. In drafts sometimes we’ll have two adjectives and then revise it to one or none. If the noun can get the job done, it doesn’t need the adjective.
• Specificity – be specific about what you’re describing. The adjective should do the work of narrowing the reader’s WIDE imagination into the very specific image you want to impart.

Types of adjectives:

• Telly – informing or surmising such as “She was angry.” in which case, we see the summation of her emotion as ‘angry’ instead of the symptoms of that emotion like a glare, narrowed eyes, or some other indicator of rage.
• Showy – dramatize or activate the noun such as “The drink was fizzy and cheerful.” You might just say “The drink fizzed cheerfully.” to replace the weak “to be” verb, but either way “fizzy” is a pretty descriptive word.
• Overwriting – applying multiple adjectives like “he London bus was big, red, and smelled of lentils.” We know it’s big and red, it’s London. The interesting part is its smell but if the sentence read “big, red, and smelly” we wouldn’t really know what it smelled of, would we?

Segment 2

Also this link on 13 types:

1. Comparative adjectives – smaller, taller
2. Superlative adjectives – best, worst
3. Predicate adjectives – adjectives that appear in the predicate of the sentence, “Jean was tall.”
4. Compound adjectives – double-dealing, happy-go-lucky
5. Possessive adjectives – mine, hers, theirs
6. Demonstrative adjectives – this, that, those
7. Proper adjectives – Russian, Victorian, Shakespearean
8. Participial adjectives – swimming lessons, reading glasses
9. Limiting adjectives – 
10. Descriptive adjectives
11. Interrogative adjectives
12. Attributive adjectives
13. Distributive adjectives

Segment 3

This link just gives 12 types but it also shares definitions and examples for each.

Here are some negative personality adjectives to use for your antagonist.

And here is another (longer) list.

Then here are 260 positive adjectives for your characters.

Segment 4

Some senior writers (people who’ve been published or have been writing for a while) will say to cut all the adjectives and adverbs but that’s bad advice for two reasons: 1) adjectives add depth and breadth to a boring piece of writing, and 2) novice writers need to learn which adjectives to cut, not all of them.

This writer explains it this way: “It’s not necessarily a bad idea to take a long, hard look at the adjectives of quality and adverbs of manner in your drafts, and seeing if the effect they’re trying for would be better achieved another way.”

How do we do that? We read more, honestly. The more you read the better you’ll get at identifying useless adjectives and too-sparse-for-its-own-good prose.