English for Today: February 2011

Today we'll see our first text modality, description. Through description we can share with people what we see and feel about the world. When we use description we make them imagine what we saw and experienced. To make it possible we use a very special kind of word: the adjective. So, let's learn how to use the adjective in our descriptions?

Order of the adjectives

When using more than one adjective to describe a noun we must pay attention to some rules:

a) Adjectives expressing opinion come first than adjectives meaning fact in word order
Ex: What a beautiful (opinion, that is, it is what you think about the rose) red (fact, the rose is red) rose.
b) Adjectives which describe general qualities come before those ones describing particular qualities.
Ex: John has a fast (general quality, that is, other cars can be fast) grey (more particular quality, that is, among all the cars we are talking about a grey one) car.

Exercise: Now we will practise a little our description skills. It'll be presented to you a painting named 'casinha nas montanhas' (little house by the mountains) by the Brazilian painter Antonia B.S. Faria.
Try to extract the most details you can from this painting using the tips above.

Casinha nas montanhas. © 2011 Antonia B.S. Faria. This painting was used in this page with the prior consent of the author.

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