Why are adjectives so bad?
Before I explain what’s wrong with adjectives, let’s have a quick refresher class. As you probably remember from school, adjectives are words that describe nouns. For example, pink, hideous, irritating, lovely, muffled, magnificent, scrawny, gorgeous, tart and grumpy, are all adjectives. Adjectives don’t have to be just one word -– they can be hyphenated, like triangle-shaped or two words, like ooey gooey. In school, teachers often tried to encourage us to use more adjectives in our compositions. I don’t know about you, but I remember being urged to scamper to the thesaurus to “improve” my writing by adding more adjectives. Trouble is, as a strategy, this is just wrong, wrong, wrong. The three main problems with adjectives There are lots of difficulties with adjectives, but here are the three main ones… • Adjectives are imprecise. For words that are supposed to improve your writing, it’s awfully funny how vague adjectives can be. Take the word magnificent, mentioned above. Does it mean
