Adjectives

Adjectives describe things and feelings, and they change form to compare or show extremes:

Regular Adjectives:

• • Add "er" for comparatives (e.g., "safer") and "est" for superlatives (e.g., "safest").
  • Use "more" and "most" for adjectives with two or more syllables (e.g., "more secure," "most secure").

Irregular Adjectives:

Change in unique ways:

• • Good → better, best
  • Bad → worse, worst
  • Far → farther/further, farthest/furthest
  • Little → less, least
  • Much/Many → more, most

Special Cases:

• Adjectives ending in "y" change to "ier" and "iest" (e.g., "happy," "happier," "happiest").
• Use "than" with comparatives and "the" with superlatives (e.g., "faster than," "the fastest").

 

Comparative Adjectives

When we want to make complex comparisons between clauses of a sentence, we need to use comparative adjectives. Let’s take a look at some examples, then we can see how to do this.

Ensuring the files containing customer data are encrypted beforehand is a much safer way of sharing them than just sending them directly to our support team.

In this sentence, we can see that the complex comparison between the two clauses is made by using a much safer way than.

In this type of complex comparison, the formula to follow is:

 

CLAUSE 1 + COMPARATIVE ADJECTIVE + THAN + CLAUSE 2 = simple comparison

Antivirus software installation should be much higher on the list of priorities than focusing on other software updates.

In this example, we can see that the complex comparison is made by separating the two clauses using much higher than.

 

Sometimes than is separated from the comparative adjective, as in both our examples:

...a much safer way of sharing them than...

...much higher on the list of priorities than...

In the long run, refusing access because it wasn’t compliant with our policies was less inconvenient than accommodating the company’s requests, and just going ahead without considering the risks.

Here we can see that this example follows the same pattern as the other two.

 

CLAUSE 1 + COMPARATIVE ADJECTIVE + THAN + CLAUSE 2 = COMPLEX COMPARISON

We have two clauses which are separated by the comparative adjective, making a complex comparison. The little difference in the last example is that the full comparative phrase remains together without separation. We can see that one thing is less convenient than the other.

 

We can see that making complex comparisons like these involves using long sentences. Using them is usually harder than we expect.