ADJECTIVES, identifying
®Read the paragraph below by the nature writer Edwin Way Teale.
®Circle the subject of the main sentence and put a box around the verb.
®Underline every adjective that you find, and then go back and double underline every phrase that acts like an adjective.
Are any of the adjectives not necessary? Do all give information that the writer assumes is needed to give an adequate description of the event?
Song of the Whitethroat
Windless, silent, under a low ceiling of gray, this first morning of the new year is like an echoing room. Sounds carry far as I walk the mile along the swamp edge, past the Insect Garden hillside and on to Milburn Pond. In a tangle of cat-briar and shadbush, near the edge of the frozen water, a white-throated sparrow is singing a snatch of its springtime song. Again and again, I hear the pure, ethereal strain, simple, moving, bringing back in memory a late spring day on a lake shore in the forests of Maine. No other voice among all the singers of nature affects me more deeply. The song of the white-throated sparrow—how fine a beginning for a new year! (Circle 1)