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Australian manual of scientific style Start communicating effectively
Taking care with modifiers
Too many adjectives and adverbs
A modifier is a word that alters or more tightly delimits the meaning of another word or phrase.
The most familiar classes of modifiers are adjectives, which modify nouns, and adverbs, which modify verbs.
In
The angry man ran quickly.
angry is an adjective for the noun man and quickly is an adverb for the past-tense verb ran.
Too many modifiers strung together can become ambiguous, or simply difficult to follow.
Does
genetically modified insect resistant early ripening sweet corn
mean
early ripening sweet corn that has been genetically modified to be resistant to insect pests
or
insect-resistant sweet corn that has been genetically modified to ripen early
or even
early ripening sweet corn that is resistant to genetically modified insects
?
Often, there is no clear meaning, so we must rewrite the sentence. Careful use of hyphens can help:
genetically modified insect-resistant early ripening sweet corn
By explicitly showing insect-resistant as a compound adjective, we reduce (though don’t remove) the ambiguity.
The solution is to completely recast the sentence. We must accept that making it clear may make it longer.
Activity
We can rewrite a sentence like our walrus example in many ways. Here are some possibilities. You may well have come up with something as good or better, though different.
- Turn it into a series of simple sentences; in this case, 3 of them.
I bought an attachment for my extensible mop. The attachment is for cleaning walruses. It is electrically powered and mildly abrasive.
- Reorder the terms to move the noun (attachment) closer to the front of the sentence, and break into 2 sentences (I have chosen a different possible meaning here):
I bought a mildly abrasive attachment for my extensible mop. It is for cleaning electric walruses.
- Reconsider what we are saying; do we need all this detail?
I bought a walrus-polishing attachment for my mop.
- Use hyphens. Here, electric applies to the compound adjective walrus-polishing, removing the possibility of an electric walrus, which was (technically at least) a viable interpretation.
I bought a mildly abrasive electric walrus-polishing attachment for my extensible mop.
Tune the solution you choose to the audience and content. The first strategy may seem clunky, but simple declarative sentences like these will work for all readers. Other solutions may make more demands on the reader.