A Guide to Use Adjectives to Start a Sentence

One of the easiest ways to improve one’s writing is to use adjectives to start a sentence.

Teachers and professors constantly advise their students to write strongly, an order that often comes across unclear and vague.

When you master how to create adjectival phrases and begin sentences with them, sentences almost automatically become active. It can take some practice, and it may feel awkward at first, but repetition will make the new sentence structure come naturally.

  • Adjectives help you add more color to your sentence.
  • You can actually use adjectives to start a sentence
  • When writing adjective sentences, you need to keep in mind its limited use.

An adjective describes a noun. It tells you what the noun is, for example, a new car is described as red.

The adjectives we use to describe nouns can be simple or complex.

An adjective like “strong” and “red” is simple, or a complex adjective like “ugly”, “tall”, “short”, or “complicated” would all describe the noun.

An adjective may also modify multiple nouns.

Example

The word large, used as an adjective, may add a lengthier description of the noun it describes. So, it describes a certain size. Similarly, an adjective like, wide, used on the noun, it’s, would add to the noun a description for a wider aspect

Adjectives are used to add more description to the idea you are trying to express through your sentence.

If you want to say exactly how a noun looks, you could use an adjective. There are a few different types of adjectives.

There are adjectives that describes a person, and some that are used to describe an object, event, place, feeling, or emotion.

Adjectives can be used to start a sentence

Using adjectives can be a handy and quick way to introduce your reader to the relevant piece of information discussed.

Add an adjective if you want to say more than that.

Example

If I said, that this book was good, I had just said that it was a good book. The reader could understand that I’m talking about the book, but they may not know much more than that.

But I would have said that this book is really good if I had taken a more detailed and descriptive approach.

start now sign that shows adjectives all around it and the word itself
Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

Step 1

An adjective in a sentence can be chosen for general purposes. Practice in simple sentences is easy.

Example

The bird flew its auburn wings into the sky.

Auburn is an adjective in the example. Usually, adjectives describe nouns.

Step 2

Separate the adjective from the rest of the phrase.

If you use the example above, consider how to modify the fact that the wings are auburn with a phrase. According to the Writing Center at the University of Ottawa, adjective phrase is “any word that modifies a noun or pronoun.”.

Changing auburn wings to auburn’s wings is as simple as changing the wings.

Step 3

Start the sentence appropriately with the words.

Initial sentence: “The bird has its auburn wings spread out into the sky.

As they take flight, their auburn wings move to the front to begin the adjective phrase. “Awing of the bird, they swept the night sky.”.

Step 4

Write a sample sentence. Start with three simple sentences.

The adjective and its noun should be separated, and then put them at the beginning of the sentence. Once you feel comfortable reworking simple sentences, move onto longer, more complex phrases.

Once you’re comfortable with adjectives, you can create more complex ones. In addition to a few words, adjective phrases are not necessary.

Example

Take the following sentence, “The sad man went to the store with his broken umbrella, but they refused to refund his money.”. There are two adjectives in the sentence: sad and broken.

Move to the front and say, “Broken umbrella in hand, the sad man walked to the store but couldn’t get a refund”.

If someone asked you to describe something, you most likely would have used an adjective (i. Noun naming an attribute).

Currently, established phrase structure rules do not limit the number of adjectives in a sentence. Although they can occur in virtually any order, native English speakers have special disciplines about which order is more appropriate.

Several types of words are present in a sentence. Nouns usually appear at the start of a sentence, and adjectives should precede the noun.

Let’s look at an underlying adjective order in English and see if the same principles can be applied to academic editing. The order in which multiple adjectives are used in a sentence tends to vary greatly.

Limits of Adjective Usage

In English, the usual limit is two or three adjectives modifying a noun. As a matter of fact, hyphens can also combine two or more words with a compound adjective to form a certain type of adjective.

Use the framework below to establish basic guidelines when defining how to create an adjective order when multiples adjectives are employed.

Examples

  • In Paris, scientists discovered this beautiful-pink-French butterfly at the PARC Floral.
  • Animal rights activists were concerned that this product was unnecessarily tested on an endangered-young-brown-African monkey.
  • Newly diagnosed diseases are unpleasant, with a big, circular red patch on the forehead skin.

It would be awkward or complicated to describe one noun or pronoun using more than three descriptive types of adjectives. Therefore, adherence to English’s proper order of adjectives is always worthwhile.

Remember that you can use adjectives to start a sentence. It may help you write sentences that describe things you wish to share or express.

Using the guide above, you may include writing adjectives at the beginning of sentences as one of your options.

Just remember to follow the guidelines to write amazing adjective sentences.

Pam is an expert grammarian with years of experience teaching English, writing and ESL Grammar courses at the university level. She is enamored with all things language and fascinated with how we use words to shape our world.

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