ShmoopTube

Where Monty Python meets your 10th grade teacher.

Search Thousands of Shmoop Videos

ELA 4: Adjectives 396 Views


Share It!


Description:

Amazing, awesome, funny, genius, scrumdiddlyuptious...we could go on describing this video, but maybe you should learn what sorts of words those are first. Hit play to learn more.

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:04

[Coop and Dino singing]

00:14

Let's say you wanted to take your favorite story and turn it into a painting or a drawing. [Girl reading a book]

00:18

How would you go about doing that? What would you draw?

00:21

Would you focus on the boring words like the and of? [Painting of words 'of' and 'the']

00:25

Honestly, we don’t even know how you would do that if you wanted to…

00:30

Chances are you would choose to focus on the adjectives. Words like cheesy and magical.

00:35

Now that would make for one pretty picture… Or at least a pretty memorable one. [Girl paints picture of magical cheeseburger]

00:39

So what are these memorable words? They're called adjectives, and they're words that

00:43

describe things.

00:44

You know… "twenty smelly, yellow bananas," or "one desperately hungry monkey." We hope [Monkey staring at bananas]

00:49

he's not too desperate. Those look nasty.

00:52

Number, opinions, sizes, age, shape, color, origin, material, and purpose are all descriptors

00:57

that identify the people, places, and things in the stories we read and hear.

01:02

And when we describe someone or something, the adjectives should be written in that exact

01:06

order.

01:06

Sure, that long list might seem a little intimidating, but don’t fear – we’ve got a pneumonic [List of descriptors and Dino discusses mneumonic device]

01:11

device that'll make remembering this list easy as pie.

01:14

Here it is: N-O-S-A-S-C-O-M-P.

01:16

Think of it like that rule at your library: “No sassy computers.” [Computer screen showing lots of 0's and 1's]

01:20

What, your library doesn’t have that rule? Maybe we need to find less sassy computers…

01:25

And yeah, we know, there are two Os and two Ss…not everything in life is easy. We'll

01:30

just have to power up our brain and remember that opinions come before origin, and size

01:34

comes before shape.

01:35

Anyway, let's put this pneumonic device to use.

01:38

Let's say we wanted to describe an airplane. [Airplane flying in the sky]

01:40

It's a Canadian airplane...

01:42

…it's really big…

01:43

…and it's bright blue.

01:45

We could say that it's a Canadian, bright blue, big airplane.

01:48

But that sounds a little bit weird, doesn't it? And you know why? Because it doesn't follow

01:52

NOSASCOMP.

01:53

So let's figure out why. “Canadian” is the origin, “bright blue” is the color,

01:58

“big” is the size.

01:59

But when we look back at NOSASCOMP, we can see that the size should come before the color,

02:04

which comes before the origin.

02:06

So when we flip our words around to be in the correct NOSASCOMP order, we get... [Blue Canadian airplane flying]

02:09

“The big, bright blue, Canadian airplane.”

02:12

See how much better that sounds? It’s like everything is right with the world again.

02:16

Using adjectives is always a good idea, because it gives your reader lots of description, [Taxis in traffic in New York]

02:21

but you all the descriptions in the world won't help an awkward, clunky sentence.

02:25

And that's why you should always use NOSASCOMP.

02:27

…Seriously, though, that computer has an attitude problem. Maybe we just need to show

02:32

it the keys to happiness. [A keyboard with a smiley face]

02:33

…Oh. That explains a lot.

Up Next

ELA 4: How Words Can Help
1205 Views

Sticks and stones, right? Well...only sometimes. It's a good idea to make sure your words aren't going to hurt others. Let's look at some ways to d...

Related Videos

ELA 4: Debating Like a Champ
744 Views

Learn to debate like a champ. It's way better than debating like a chimp. That just takes mudslinging to a whole new level.

ELA 4: Types of Biographies
277 Views

Today we'll learn about biographies and autobiographies. And no, the second one has nothing to do with the lives of cars. 

ELA 4: Complete Sentences
775 Views

In this lesson we'll subject you to some verbs and predicates. Each one is a necessary part of a complete breakfas—er...sentence.

ELA 4: Word Choice
222 Views

Choosing words carefully is important. You may end up vexing the assemblage of citizens you're conversing with...or you might even just plain bore...