ShmoopTube

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[Coop and Dino singing]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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describe things.

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

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he's not too desperate. Those look nasty.

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

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

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

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order.

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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]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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comes before shape.

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

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

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It's a Canadian airplane...

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…it's really big…

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…and it's bright blue.

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

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

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NOSASCOMP.

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

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“big” is the size.

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

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which comes before the origin.

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

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“The big, bright blue, Canadian airplane.”

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

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

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

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And that's why you should always use NOSASCOMP.

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

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

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…Oh. That explains a lot.

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