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Descriptive nouns provide specific and expressive meaning, often eliminating the need for adjectives. They can be common or proper nouns and should be capitalized. Descriptive verbs can also enhance a sentence’s evocative quality.
A descriptive noun serves to indicate a specific person, place, thing, or idea in a way that is intentionally evocative or descriptive rather than generic. It still provides the basic function of a noun within a clause, but it does so in a more expressive way than other nouns. The word “dog,” for example, is a noun but is not inherently descriptive of a particular breed or type of dog; while a word like “spaniel” or “poodle” indicates a clearer concept. A friendly name can be a common or proper noun and should be capitalized as appropriate.
Using a descriptive noun in a sentence often provides a more specific meaning without the need for adjectives that might make the sentence too verbose. Descriptive words can provide as much meaning and imagery in a single word as many words might otherwise be needed to create. A simple sentence that lacks a noun or descriptive verbs would be: “The dog has entered the room.” This is grammatically valid as a sentence, containing a subject in the form of the noun phrase, “The dog”, a predicate, “walked” and a direct object in the form of a prepositional phrase, “in the room”.
The sentence, however, is quite boring and can be made much more interesting through the inclusion of expressive words, which could be added to or used in place of existing words in the sentence. While an adjective, such as “The big dog” could be used, it is often preferable for a writer to avoid these types of claims and “show” that the dog is big rather than “tell” the reader that it is. The use of a descriptive noun such as “great dane” indicates that the dog is large by specifying what kind of dog it is; the writer shows the size to the reader rather than telling the reader it is large.
A descriptive verb could be used to make the sentence even more evocative and interesting. Rather than “The dog has entered the room,” the sentence could be rewritten as “The Great Dane has entered the library.” The verb “to walk” indicates a particular type of walk, which is preferable to “walk slowly”, and a second descriptive noun can be used to indicate exactly which type of room the dog has entered. Just like any other type of noun, a descriptive noun can be common, like “librarian,” or proper, like “New York,” and should be capitalized accordingly.
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