Cover of Dracula

On a re-reading of Harper Lee’s novel To King a Mockingbird, I found something that I had skipped over so many times in past readings: a grammatical lesson on the adjective, right from the narrator’s mouth:

Scout says: Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I’d have the facts.

What are adjectives anyway?

In general, adjectives qualify, limit, narrow, describe, embellish, adorn, or simply encroach on nouns. But they don’t change them. Strip the nouns of all qualifications and there you have the plain, naked facts, naked object, naked things, artifacts, and naked ideas as originally invented.

No wonder Atticus Finch —the narrator’s father— is the most revered American hero! It just happens that not only is he a good father to Scout, but also a character who knows well the American English language.

But knowing the facts, or just writing a list of a bunch of plain nouns all by themselves will surely be a tedious task for both writer and reader. To break the tedium of using boring language writers often embellish their text with an abundance of adjectives which often are unnecessary. Even master writers become boring by using an abundance of embellishments. Take Bram Stoker in Dracula:

Dracula’s castle was dark, damp, and desolate.

However, one single but well-chosen adjective could have done the job, and without a doubt give the sentence a patina of succinctness and elegance:

Dracula’s castle was stark.

Except that by attempting to be minimalist we could be destroying the full meaning of what the author was trying to convey; not to mention the rhetorical aspect: in the above example, perhaps Stoker was trying to highlight the alliteration of the ‘d’ sound. In general, though, stitching together three or more adjectives is a bad idea.

So how do we know a particular word is an adjective? How do we go about recognizing these words and thus avoid stitching them together? Adjectives are “coloring words” and add content to the sentence; they can be detected easily enough because they respond to the questions:

What kind of noun is it?

If you go to “Best Buy” and tell the attendants at the counter: “I want to buy a computer,” I’m sure you will be asked: “What kind?” You’ll be prompted to give an adjective —laptop, a Mac, a PC— to narrow the noun ‘computer.’

Question: Which noun is it? Or which one?
Answer: The blue one next to the white tower.

Another useful fact of the English language is, that while most of us learned in school that adjectives modify the nouns and pronouns, few of us learned that adjectives are also used to qualify verbs—linking verbs, that is.

An adjective must follow a linking verb

Linking verbs are verbs that express a state of being rather than an action: for example, to feel, to taste, to look, to remain, to become, and to turn.

My cat Bijou felt bad.
These cashews taste sweet.
We looked good on the dance floor.
We remained calm.
The apples turned bad and inedible.

In closing, let’s answer this question: what is a good essay opening sentence?

In my experience a good opening sentence for essay writing should contain simple, humble, and pithy words—preferably prepositions.

If you are a teacher, a student, a business person, or a plain Joe who must write an essay, mastering the above material may be quite useful. You should have noticed that my opening sentence ‘On a re-reading of …’ is humble and introduces the topic with a quotation from a well-known novel.

But this is just one way to begin an essay. I could just as well have started with an anecdote, posing a question, or any other technique.

Related articles

• What are Sentence Openers? (sentenceopeners.com)