Adjectives and commas | Adjectives | Khan Academy

Hey Garans, hey Paige, hi David.

Hey, so Paige, I went to the grocery store yesterday and I got this apple. Okay? I put it in the fridge, uh, and this morning when I opened the fridge, the apple was all like gross and sticky and mushy. I really want to write a letter to the grocery store and say, "Hey, you sold me a gross apple."

Yeah, uh, but I'm stuck. Okay, um, I don't, I feel like I ought to put a comma in here. So if, I if I'm, so here's the sentence I've got so far: "You sold me a mushy sticky apple—gross, gross, unacceptable, totally. So I would like my $138 back."

But in another draft of the letter I wrote, "You sold me a mushy green apple." Okay, so mushy sticky or mushy green? Yeah, and I feel like, and I don't know how to put this into words yet, but we're going to put it into words 'cause that's our job.

Whether or not there should be a comma in between mushy and green or mushy and sticky? Yeah, 'cause these feel different to me. Right, right.

Um, yeah. So there's actually a couple tests that you can do on these sentences to see if you need a comma between the adjectives or not. So Paige, what distinguishes a pair like mushy and sticky from mushy and green?

There's this sort of hierarchy or like order that you put adjectives in when you have multiple of them in a sentence, and it is called Dosa SCP. Dosa SCP!

All together now: D determiner, O opinion, S size, A age, S again shape, C color, O origin, M material, and P purpose.

Oh, okay! So mushy and sticky are both opinion adjectives. Yeah, so these are kind of in the same class, whereas mushy and green, that's an opinion and a color. Yeah, they're in two different classes, right?

So Dosa SCP helps determine adjective order, right? So it's the order in which you would use—in which you were stacking these adjectives—you would use them in this Dosa SCP order.

Right, so like in the second sentence, mushy is an opinion, like you said, and green is a color. And in Dosa SCP, opinion comes before color, so that's the order that you write them in.

So like in the first sentence when you have mushy and sticky, which are both opinion adjectives, these are called coordinate adjectives. They're in the same category of Dosa SCP, and if you wanted to, you could reverse the order. You could say "sticky mushy apple."

Oh, let's try that! Yeah, looks good to me: sticky mushy—mushy sticky, same thing.

Um, okay, so if we're trying to determine whether or not we have coordinate adjectives, I guess the first thing we would do is consult Dosa SCP, right?

So that's step one! Yep! And what is a Dosa, Paige?

Oh, it's like a pancake, right? Yeah, it's like a South Indian pancake. That's pretty cool! And to SCP is a word we made up that means to eat.

Sure, eat some pancakes, scump on them. Uh, so that's step one. Step two: try the reversal method, right? And that's like changing it from mushy sticky to sticky mushy?

Uh, and step three is stick an "and" in there. Mhm! If you can reverse the order of the adjectives and you can put "and" in between the two of them, then they're coordinate adjectives.

And if they're coordinate adjectives, you need to separate them with a comma. Exactly! And that's why, in the case of the second sentence with "mushy green apple," you don't put a comma between them.

They're in different categories in Dosa SCP, so they must stay in that order, and there's no need for a comma.

Thanks, Paige! I'm going to get back to drafting my angry letter. You can learn anything!

David out.

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