Today I am going to talk about compound adjectives. When I work with high tech documents there are a lot of compound adjectives used to make the sentences tighter and less wordy. (Every character counts if you are uploading an abstract for a white paper, for example.)
Compound adjectives can economize your adjectival use in great ways, for example "Patricia came to the party wearing a hand-embroidered dress."
This above example is preferable to "Patricia came to the party wearing a dress that was embroidered by hand."
The second sentence isn't wrong, but the first sentence is leaner with the meaning quickly available to the reader.
I sometimes miss compound adjectives.
They are kind of sneaky sometimes and depending on the type of material you are working with they come up more or less often.
Here are some examples of compound adjectives I have used in abstracts:
- cost-effectively eliminate
- on-time fulfillment
- high-quality products
- in-season buys
- enterprise-class networks
- carrier-class networks
And simple language and clear sentences are the way to go in any type of document you're working on.
Have a great one (I think I might be getting my son's flu! Yuck!!!).
Hopefully I will be up and running tomorrow with The Journey.
5 comments:
Did you read that article (I'm trying to remember where I saw it) about the hyphen being used less and less often? I'll try to find it for you. Oh, here it is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/weekinreview/07mcgrath.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
It's been a hot topic with my fellow copyeditors.
Hi Anne, I can't follow the link you gave me. Was the article published on October 7, 2007? Do you know the title of it? When I try the link it says the article has been archived.
I'm really curious to read it!
Sorry, I'm sure a wild goose (or is it wild-goose) chase is just what you need when you're feeling sick.
The article is "Death-Knell. Or Death Knell" by CHARLES McGRATH
Published: October 7, 2007
Thanks very much, Anne. I'm gonna check that out. I will get back to you once I've read it.
Cheers.
Hi Anne, I read the piece by Charles McGrath. it was really good.
I am a punctuation minimalist so I would only use a hyphen where clarity was necessary. Other editors I have worked with were more militant about their stance, however. They were constantly pointing out the compound adjectives that I had 'missed.'
Everyone has their comfort zone.
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