Reviewing Pet Descriptions
About this episode
The hosts introduce a listener's message describing her rescued dog and announce plans to review the grammar used in her description.
Transcript
A few weeks ago, we asked our readers and listeners to describe their pets.
We asked them to practice using multiple adjectives in a certain order.
One reader, Maria from Argentina, wrote to us about her dog, Cefarina.
In this week's Everyday Grammar, we will review Maria's message describing her dog, and we will give some grammar suggestions.
I have five dogs, three cats and one rooster.
I love animals very much, but I am going to describe only one of them, my female dog called Ceferina.
She is a senior big dog.
I meet her at the street.
Show the other 74 sentences
She was very ill and sad.
Now is a cute dog.
Her colors is black and her eyes brown.
She is a friendly dog.
She looks like brave, but she is lovely dog.
Let's start with the first two sentences.
I have five dogs, three cats, and one rooster.
I love animals very much, but I am going to describe only one of them.
These two sentences are almost perfect.
Maria uses number adjectives to describe how many pets she has.
Maria has nine pets total.
She then says that she will only choose one.
We suggest adding my before animals, because Maria then refers to her animals as them in the second half of the sentence.
The choice my is a more specific choice.
We also suggest adding a comma before but to separate the two clauses.
I love my animals very much, but I am going to describe only one of them.
Let's move on to the next two sentences.
My female dog called Seforina.
She is a senior big dog.
In the first sentence, Maria describes the gender of the dog.
We recommend adding "is" before "called."
This is a passive sentence, so we must use a form of "be" plus the verb in the past participle form.
My female dog is called Seforina.
The next sentence has two adjectives, senior and big.
This is where we should pay attention to the order of adjectives.
When we use two or more adjectives from different categories, we must order them a certain way in the sentence.
The order of adjective categories is as follows: quantity, opinion, size, age, shape or length, color, origin, material, and purpose.
We recommend changing the order of the adjectives senior and big, based on the order of adjectives rule.
Size adjectives come before age adjectives.
She is a big senior dog.
Note that we do not need a comma between the adjectives because these are cumulative adjectives.
In other words, they build on each other.
They are from different adjective categories, so they cannot be separated by a comma.
Let's look at the next few sentences.
I meet her at the street.
She was very ill and sad.
Now is a cute dog.
First, instead of meet, you can use the verb find, to say that you first discovered or saw your dog.
You should use the past tense of find, because you are talking about a time in the past.
Next, we suggest changing the preposition "at" to either the preposition "in" or "on."
" In the street" means that you found her in the middle of the street.
" In" is used for talking about an enclosed space.
" On the street" means that you found her somewhere along the street.
" On" is used for general location.
Maria did a great job separating the adjectives "ill" and "sad" with the conjunction "and."
These are opinion adjectives and carry equal importance in the sentence.
This makes them coordinating adjectives, so we can use "and" or only a comma to separate them.
We can also change their order and keep the same meaning.
In the next sentence, we need a subject.
We can use the pronoun she.
We also suggest adding a comma after now.
I found her on the street.
She was very ill and sad.
Now she is a cute dog.
And finally, we have the last three sentences.
Her colors is black and her eyes brown.
She is a friendly dog.
She looks like brave, but she is lovely dog.
In the first sentence, we have some subject verb agreement issues.
Since Maria's dog is black, color can be singular.
We need the verb are in the second half of that sentence to go after eyes.
Her color is black, and her eyes are brown.
Finally, in the last sentence, we suggest a different word for brave.
We want another word that is the opposite of lovely.
We could say that Cefarina looks fierce, which is like brave and intense combined.
We can also remove like because we are not making a comparison, just a contrast.
And finally, we need to add the indefinite article a before dog.
She looks fierce, but she is a lovely dog.
Today we looked at Maria's message about her dog, Seferina.
We talked about the order of adjectives, commas, and subject-verb agreement.
We learned about coordinating and cumulative adjectives, and their connection to the order of adjectives.
Thank you, Maria, for telling us about Seferina.
We are happy she found such a loving home.
I'm Faith Perlo, and I'm Anna Matteo.
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Audio and English text: VOA Learning English, a work of the U.S. government in the public domain. DeepListen arranged the transcript sentence by sentence. VOA has no partnership with DeepListen and does not endorse it.
Source: VOA Learning English (public domain).