Appositives
Explanation
In your essays, you often want to use long, complex
sentences to draw your reader in, to avoid the
choppiness that comes from a series of short sentences,
and to provide clear and vivid detail. While adjectives can
modify nouns (the blue car), sometimes nouns
themselves—appositives—also modify nouns for the
purpose of offering details or being specific. Sometimes
these appositives will be called noun phrase appositives
(or NPAs).
What does an appositive look like?
• It will begin with a noun or an article (a, an, the).
• As a phrase, it will not have its own subject and verb.
• They are usually set off with a comma, but occasionally are separated with a colon (:) or
dash (—).
Examples:
• The car, an antique Stingray, cost ten thousand dollars.
• Martha, Beth’s older sister, came to the open-mic night with her guitar.
• To the baseball game Roger brought all his goodies: balls, a glove, a hat and a sign.
• She took her medication—pain killers and cold medicine—and hid them in her suitcase.
Create Your Own Appositives
Because you may be writing a whole new sentence to give just a little piece of information to your
reader, try to make your writing less choppy and repetitive by using an appositive to combine the
ideas.
You might have:
• I wanted to give Droopy to the SPCA before she attacked.
• Droopy is my sister’s ferocious pitbull.
which could easily be combined:
• I wanted to give Droopy, my sister’s ferocious pit bull, to the SPCA before she attacked.
What happened to create the appositive? The writer noticed that the second sentence, “Droopy is my
sister’s ferocious pit bull” only gave more information about Droopy, who had already been introduced
in the previous sentence. That additional information is dropped into the first sentence after the noun
it modifies. Remember to use commas to set off the NPA.
…connections…
For more help combining
sentences, see Adjectives and
Adverbs
appositive
noun
