Adjective placement

In English, a few simple rules guide the placement of adjectives in relation to nouns.

1. In general, an adjective goes before the noun it modifies, unless special emphasis on the adjective is needed. In a pair of words, the second is usually perceived to have greater emphasis. So, in these examples, the noun has the most emphasis:

old dog
burnt trees

And in these, the adjective is emphasized:

songs half-heard
words unspoken

2. When an adjective is used to describe a noun denoting something owned, the adjective should follow the possessive noun or pronoun:

my sister’s yellow watch
the girls’ blue shoes
her __________’s warm embrace

To understand this rule, take the second example. The girls’ blue shoes is clear, while the blue girls’ shoes conjures a surreal image.

3. An adjective may be a predicate:

I am warm.
The show was boring.
The President is eloquent.

These adjectives are predicate adjectives.

4. An adjective, especially a participial adjective, may introduce the subject of a sentence. Such an adjective is usually set apart by a comma:

Running, she made it home in time.

Big and white, the birds land recklessly.

With such sentences, writers must make sure the introductory adjective applies directly to the noun it modifies. Otherwise, the adjective becomes a dangler—for example:

Playing video games, the hours just flew by.

This technically says the hours were playing video games.

Predicate adjectives

A predicate adjective is a descriptive word that follows a linking verb and tells something about the subject of the verb. The underlined words in the below examples are predicate adjectives, each applying to the subject of its sentence:

The kittens were unimpressed.

The sky was multicolored.

The stove is very clean.

The haughty bureaucrats visiting the magical village in the middle of the forest on the second day of the Year of the Rat were distracted.

Comparative and superlative adjectives

In English, there are three degrees of adjectives:

(1) positive adjectives (e.g., rich), used to express a quality of an object without comparing it to anything else;
(2) comparative adjectives (e.g., richer), used to compare two things or groups of things;
and (3) superlative adjectives (e.g., richest), used to express that one thing has a quality to a greater degree than two or more other things.

Guidelines for comparative and superlative adjectives

When two things are compared, the -est suffix is never appropriate, although this rule is sometimes broken in informal speech or writing.
To create a comparative or superlative adjective out of a monosyllabic adjective ending in a single vowel followed by a single consonant, double the vowel and add the suffix—e.g., fat, fatter, fattest.
When the positive adjective ends in a silent e, remove the e and add the suffix—e.g., late, later, latest.
Adjectives of three or more syllables use more and most instead of -er and -est—e.g., familiar, more familiar, most familiar.
Some adjectives of two syllables also take more and most—e.g., active, more active, most active. Some use the comparative and superlative suffixes—e.g., shabby, shabbier, shabbiest. There is no easy way to know which words fall into which category.
Participles used as adjectives take more and most instead of -er and -est—e.g, outmoded, more outmoded, most outmoded; boring, more boring, most boring.

Irregular comparative and superlative adjectives

A few adjectives have irregular comparative and superlative forms. These are the most common:

bad, worse, worst
far, farther/further, farthest/furthest
good, better, best
old (referring to people), elder, eldest

Participial adjectives

A participial adjective is a past participle (i.e., an -ed word) or present participle (an -ing word) that functions as an adjective. Participial adjectives work like any other type of adjective. For example, the participle in each of these phrases modifies the noun that follows:

the emptied boxes
a flashing light
the undulating waves
the crashed jetliner

When a participial adjective appears before the main clause of a sentence, the participle should come directly before the noun in the main clause. Otherwise, it becomes a dangler. For example, this is troublesome:

Once emptied, we put the boxes in the basement.

With this construction, the participial adjective emptied applies to the pronoun we, and we is obviously not what emptied is supposed to apply to. One way to revise this sentence would be,

Once the boxes were empty, we put them in the basement.

Proper adjectives

A proper adjective is an adjective derived from a proper noun. They usually begin with capital letters—for example:

Iranian embassy
Spanish galleon
Napoleonic warfare
Germanic tribes
Australian dollar

A noun modified by a proper adjective should not be capitalized. For example, Iranian Embassy and Spanish Galleon are incorrect.

In general, it’s best to avoid using a place name as an adjective when the name contains more than one word. You can get away with phrases like New York minute or San Francisco fog, but, especially when the name has a comma, using it as an adjective makes the sentence difficult—for example:

Nirvana, the Seattle, Washington band that had kicked off grunge’s breakthrough into mainstream music, was scheduled to headline the festival . . .

Some writers put another comma after the state, creating clunky sentences like this:

Both candidates mentioned meeting the Toledo, Ohio, man on the campaign trail, and tied him into their economic plans. [Daily Orange]

One way to fix sentences like these is to cut out the state name—the Seattle band, the Toledo man. If the city shares a name with other cities in other states, consider putting the state in parentheses—Charleston (West Virginia) man, the Columbus (Ohio) band.