A standard piece of advice about essay writing is that you should make a plan. I used to think – and some people still do think – that this is a linear process: generate ideas —> research —> plan. But of course it isn’t as simple as that.

This article is a continuation of Essay writing: answer the question!

Instead of that linear, 1-2-3, process, in practice it works much more like this:

Let’s take an example:

Many find that Measure for Measure fits uneasily into its First Folio category of Comedy. Consider the extent to which Shakespeare subverts or endorses the generic conventions of
  comedy.

Your initial reactions to this question might be:

The very fact that your reactions take the form of questions means that the next stage in essay writing is to do some research:

1. inside your head: recalling what you already know
2. in your notes: recalling what you have heard and read
3. in books and online

In turn this can (should!) lead to more notes and ideas. Here, for example, is a clip of a diagramatic set of notes on the first chapter of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres by Lawrence Danson:

(Download the full diagram as a pdf here.)

This research may lead to some early notes on how you might tackle the essay:

So in this case, initial ideas have led to research, which has resulted in some sketchy ideas about the plan. This in turn can generate fresh ideas or lead to further research. Most of the time it isn’t a clear-cut business. Even if you start with a reasonably clear plan, you nearly always find that later research generates new ideas that mean you have to adapt it.

Just how all this works depends not just on the subject matter, but also on how you like to work. Some people prefer to get everything cut and dried as early as possible, while others are happy to work in a freer way, keeping their options open and being prepared to re-write even at quite a late stage. The important thing to remember is that at some stage you have got to go through the threefold process of:

• generating ideas
• doing  research
• making a plan

And if you launch straight into the writing process, without first making a plan, you’ll still have to do the preparatory work – it will just be a lot messier.

You’ll find more about essay writing in my book
The Oxford Guide to Effective Writing and Speaking.

If you find yourself struggling with essay writing, it’s often because you haven’t understood the question, or haven’t defined it clearly enough in your own mind. Essay writing problems are really thinking problems. Sometimes teachers set topics that are imprecise or vaguely worded. But if students just go along with this and write the essay without trying to define the subject more precisely, then they only have themselves to blame. But teachers quite often set topics that are deliberately open to interpretation, to find out what you make of them. Either way, you need to begin by defining the question to your own satisfaction before you begin planning and research. Even then, you may find that your definition changes as you work on the essay. But it is essential to start with a few notes, or even a paragraph setting out what you think the essay question means.

Question types

A good starting point is to ask yourself, ʻWhat is the question asking me to do?ʼ Essay questions often provide helpful clues to what is expected. For example:

1. What was the impact of e-commerce on EU business in the first decade of the twenty-first century?
2. What is meant by ʻfactoringʼ?
3. In King Lear, Gloucester and Lear both learn through suffering. In what other ways are they similar and how might their circumstances be said to be different?
4. ʻOil is the only important factor in Middle Eastern politics todayʼ. Discuss.
5. What were the main events leading up to the American Civil War?

Essay writing task types

Each of these questions asks the writer to perform a different task:

1. Analyse
   Question 1 asks the writer to examine a particular phenomenon and analyse its likely effects. Analytical questions ask the writer to tease out the significant features of a situation, to describe them, and to explain why they are significant.
2. Define
   Question 2 asks for a definition of an economic term. The writer is required to list its defining features and to support this definition by reference to good examples from the real world.
3. Compare and contrast
   Question 3 refers to two characters from a play who have similarities and differences and asks the writer to set these out. The question does not ask the writer to describe one character, describe the other, and then compare them. Instead the writer has to find key features of similarity and difference and build the essay up around these.
4. Argue a case
   Question 4 puts a challenging interpretation of a piece of recent history and asks the writer to examine the two sides of the argument and evaluate them.
5. Narrate
   Here the writer is being asked to tell a story. The danger of narrative is that writing it seems easy: anyone can tell a story and many people enjoy doing so. As a result writers often fall back on narrative, when they should be analysing, defining, or arguing.

You’ll find more about essay writing in my book
The Oxford Guide to Effective Writing and Speaking.

Each of these types of question has its own distinctive structures and approaches. Sometimes questions are ʻpureʼ examples of one type, as in the examples quoted. More often they are hybrids, combining two or more types in one question.

Take this question, for example:

Many find that Measure for Measure fits uneasily into its First Folio category of Comedy. Consider the extent to which Shakespeare subverts or endorses the generic conventions of
  comedy.

On the face of it, this looks like a fairly straightforward type 2 question: you are being asked to define the play. Is it a comedy or isn’t it? But when you start to think about it, questions start to niggle. What was the First Folio category of Comedy? What are the generic conventions of comedy? Is there just one, or are there lots of different ones? Do different people have different answers to those questions? And anyway who said this play had to be put in that particular section of the First Folio?

In other words, the question is more complicated than it might seem at first glance. As a result you soon see that you are being asked to do more than one type of writing:

• Define
  This is what the question seems to be asking you to do: define what kind of play Measure for Measure is. So your essay has to amount to a definition.
• Analyse
  Before you can do that, you are going to have to analyse what was understood by the word ‘comedy’ in Shakespeare’s time – and possibly what we thinks it means now.
• Compare and contrast
  You will then need to compare and contrast the various definitions you have come up with.
• Narrate
  You may need to sketch in some of the history of this: how the definition of comedy was changing at the time that Shakespeare wrote the play. You might want to set this against the history of time, explaining how the arrival of James I as King of England changed things.
• Argue a case
  And when you have got all these possibilities open in front of you, you need to provide your own take on the question and explain why it is right.

You’ll find more about essay writing in my book
The Oxford Guide to Effective Writing and Speaking.

The second article in the series on essay writing can be found here.

If you want to improve your command of English words, you need to take a positive and active approach to developing your vocabulary. Here’s a simple ten-point plan to help you get a grip on words.

1: Take a positive attitude towards building your vocabulary.

Remember that you have a passive vocabulary of words that you understand but rarely or never use. There are also a lot of words that you have seen or heard more than once but feel rather hazy about. Make a real effort to move words from these lists into the list of words that you feel comfortable about using.

2: Use a good dictionary and thesaurus.

If you need to find out or check the meanings of words, use a good dictionary. Work at it to make sure that you can use it efficiently and confidently. When writing, make use of a good thesaurus to find all the possible words and then to choose the best for your purpose.

3: Remember that there is always a choice of words.

Especially when writing, don’t just settle for the first word that comes into your head. Think of other words that might be more accurate or more suitable. Whenever possible use a thesaurus to widen the choice of words available to you.

4: Think about your audience’s skills and knowledge.

We use words to communicate, and communication is a two-way process. Think about who will hear or read your words: make an assessment of their language skills and try to avoid words that they will find difficult or impossible to understand. Think also of their knowledge of the subject you are talking or writing about. Use terms that they will understand and, if you have to use a term that they may not be familiar with, make sure that you explain it the first time you use it.

5: Think about the social setting in which you are communicating.

Communication isn’t just about using language accurately; it also involves thinking about your relationship with your audience. Words that are fine in one social setting will jar horribly in another. So think about formality and informality. By all means use colloquial language and even slang in the right context, but if you are unsure of your audience, avoid slang like the plague.

6: Avoid jargon.

Jargon is fun for insiders but can be guaranteed to irritate everyone else. So unless you are in the company of ‘consenting adults in private’, don’t use it!

7: Tune into new words but don’t be seduced by them.

Language is a living organism and words grow old and die, just as new words are born. English is a world language. It is par excellence the language of the Internet. So new words come flooding into it from all over the globe. Some of these will become a part of the language and will be widely used. Most will soon fade and die. So be aware of new words, cherish them, but don’t waste time trying to be always in fashion. If you do, you will probably end up looking ridiculous.

8: Learn more about how words are used in sentences.

You cannot develop your vocabulary or use dictionaries and other word reference books effectively unless you have a basic knowledge of how words work in sentences. This will also benefit your use of the langauge as a whole, especially your writing.

9: Understand word structure and use your knowledge to tackle new words.

Many words are constructed from common parts. Work to understand this system: learn the meanings of common prefixes and the uses of suffixes in the building of new words. Use this knowledge to help with any long words that bother you.

10: Have fun with words!

The English language is a wonderful thing: infinitely expressive, remarkably flexible, and growing in scope all the time. So don’t let words master you – get a grip on them. And enjoy them.

This article is based on Lexis – an introduction to English words.

It’s been a long time in the making, but my latest title, Lexis – an introduction to English words is finally available.

You can see full details here.

Lexis takes a relaxed and – I hope – entertaining look at our vocabulary. It begins by asking, ‘How many words do you know?’ and offering one way of finding out the answer, before pulling the rug away from the whole idea! In fact the question is almost impossible to answer. For a start, what do you mean by word, and what do you mean by know? They seem straightforward enough, but as soon as you begin to examine them, you find they aren’t as simple as they might at first appear.

Then there are chapters on the way in which words can help and hinder effective communication, before we move on to the history of english words and the interesting topic of how new words are created. The first part of the book concludes with a quick and fairly painless look at the grammar of words, and offers a 10-point plan for ‘Getting a grip on words’.

The second part of the book is a reference section, with detailed information on:

• Word classes: nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, and determiners.
• Prefixes and their meanings.
• How suffixes are used to form new words.
• A list of words that are frequently confused, with definitions and examples.
• A glossary of technical terms.
• A list of print and online resources

Lexis is available as a printable PDF with interactive table of contents and hyperlinks. You can get from the Store, for just $4.50/£3.00.

Alternatively you can buy the Kindle version. For a limited period of time this is available for the giveaway price of $1.19/£0.77:
Amazon UK
Amazon US

But you’ll have to be quick, I shan’t be able to price it that low for long!

Rather confusingly, the word ‘verb’ is used in two different ways: to describe a type of word and to describe part of a clause. In this article I will treat these two separately.

Verbs as a word class

In this sense, verbs are on the same level as nouns, adjectives and adverbs.

One of the key features of verbs is that they change their form, or inflect more than other words.

Verb inflection
Verbs inflect like this:

Forms of the verb
So we can say that all verbs have five forms, or parts:

• stem walk
• present tense walk/walks
• past tense walked
• -ing participle walking
• -ed participle walked

We can can use the stem to form the infinitive: to walk.

Regular and irregular verbs
All verbs do not work in the same way as the example we have used. Walk is regular. Irregular verbs are less predictable in the way they form the five parts:

• stem eat
• present tense eat/eats
• past tense ate
• -ing participle eating
• -ed participle eaten

There are far more regular verbs than there are irregular, but many of the commonest verbs are irregular.

Find out more
You can find out much more about verbs in my downloadable book
Grammar for Teachers.

Main verbs

Verbs can be divided into three groups:

• verbs that need an object
  Elephants eat grass.
• verbs that do not need an object
  Elephants exist.
• linking verbs
  Elephants are animals.

Verbs that need an object
In normal speech, Elephants eat… is incomplete because it leaves us asking, eat what? Verbs like eat that need an object are called transitive.

Verbs that do not need an object
Exist on the other hand does not have to be followed by an object and is an intransitive verb.

It is important to note that some verbs can be both transitive and intransitive. For example, work:

It’s a formula that is obviously working.
He trains people to work the machine.

Linking verbs
These verbs are used to link a subject and its complement. They include be, seem, and appear.

Every sentence must contain at least one main verb.

Did you know?
You can find out much more about verbs in my downloadable book
Grammar for Teachers.

Auxiliary verbs

There is also a group of verbs that don’t have a dictionary meaning, and are not normally used on their own in a sentence. They are used with main verbs. For example:

A

I am eating bread.
They have eaten bread.
You do eat bread.

B

I shall eat bread.
I might eat bread.
I could eat bread.

All these verbs are called auxiliaries because they help main verbs. They have been divided into groups A and B, because they have different characteristics.

Primary verbs
The verbs in Group A, be, have, do can also work as main verbs. For example:

• I am happy to see these names included.
• I have a new life now and new friends.
• We do things that are controversial.

These primary verbs are thus dual-function.

Modal auxiliaries
The verbs in Group B cannot work as main verbs and normally appear with a main verb. These are the modal auxiliaries:

• will – shall – would – should
• may – might
• can – could
• must
• ought (+to)

Verbs as a clause element

Sometimes the verb in a clause consists of just one word:

A prisoner escaped.

Often it is more than one word:

A prisoner has escaped.

The verb in a clause is more accurately called the verb phrase. The verb phrase can contain several words:

She should have been working today.

The important thing to remember is that each of these words is a verb.

The full facts
You can find out much more about verbs in my downloadable book
Grammar for Teachers.

Tenses

We saw above that English verbs have two tense forms: present (I work) and past (I worked).We change the form of the verb to give information about time.

But the verb phrase can give us a lot more information than that, and we often use the word ‘tense’  in a looser and wider way: to describe the form of the verb phrase that provides information about time and aspect. ‘Time’ refers to past, present, and future; ‘aspect’ refers to the focus that the verb phrase gives us on what is being described.

English tenses
In the broader meaning of the word, English has these tenses:-

Tense and aspect
We have already seen one form of the present tense:

Elephants eat grass.

English has, however, more than one form of the present tense. Compare these two sentences:

I eat plenty of vegetables and I don’t like chocolate.
The ladies watching the late afternoon episode of ‘Crossroads’ are eating Mr Kipling cakes from their local Safeway, wearing their Crimplene trouser suits.

They are both ‘present’ in the sense that both describe something that is true at the time of writing. But only the second describes something that is obviously happening at that moment. We call the first (eat) the simple present, and the second (are eating) the present continuous.

There is also a third form of the present. Compare this sentence with the two previous ones:

I have eaten there; it is wonderful and not ferociously expensive.

It refers to an event that happened in the past, but the speaker is still thinking about it – its effects, good or bad, are still in his or her mind. So, it is in one sense ‘present’. In another sense it is past, completed – the action has been ‘perfected’. Hence the name of this tense, the present perfect.

These three versions of the present tense, simple, continuous and perfect are called aspects. They allow us to use considerable sophistication when talking about events.

Tense and time
Despite the wide range of tenses English has to offer, there are also many other ways in which we can indicate time in our sentences. The simple present tense, for example, can be used to talk about past, present, future and timeless events:

He goes into a restaurant and he says, ‘Oh the waiter, erm, let me see the menu…’ (past)
Rooney shoots… It’s a goal! (present)
Tomorrow we enter the mountains, and everything will change. (future)
Fairly pure water freezes at about 0°C (if given sufficient time). (timeless)

Future time, in particular, is represented in a variety of ways:

Tomorrow we enter the mountains, and everything will change.
(Simple present used for scheduled actions.)

Tomorrow we are holding a party in our bungalow, which has room for about 60 people…
(Present continuous used for plans.)

We are going to change the world of the media!
(going to future for plans.)

We shall look at these issues more fully later on.
(will/shall future: unmarked future)

Buy the book!
You can find out much more about verbs in my downloadable book
Grammar for Teachers.

After a good dictionary, a thesaurus is the most useful word reference book in a writer’s library … provided you know how to use it.

The name ‘thesaurus’ comes from a Classical Greek word meaning ‘treasury’ or ‘store’, and a thesaurus is just that: a treasure-house of words. The thesaurus was invented in the mid-19th century by Peter Mark Roget who published, in 1852, his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, classified and arranged so as to facilitate the Expression of Ideas and assist in Literary Composition. Roget organized his work into a number of basic concepts, each of which was then broken down into subconcepts. Some modern thesauruses follow a modified version of Roget’s categories, while others have taken the basic idea and developed it in their own way. The Bloomsbury Thesaurus, for example, has 23 basic concepts, such as ‘Communication’. Each of these is then broken down into sections such as ‘Truth’ and ‘Falsehood’. These are then usually broken down into further sections such as ‘authenticity’ and within each of these sections words are grouped according to word class (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs).

Clauses are the building blocks of sentences and longer texts. This article looks at the five commonest clause patterns and the components they contain. It concentrates on clauses that make up a whole sentence – simple sentences.

Five basic clause patterns

It’s obvious that if you want to find out the meaning of a word you need to look it up in a dictionary. But which dictionary should you choose?

Too large?

The very biggest dictionaries, such as The Oxford English Dictionary, contain a wealth of information. This, for example, is the beginning of the entry for the word ‘hope’:

If you are a scholar, then this level of information may well be very important. For everyday use, however, it is probably rather more than we require.

Too small?

At the other end of the scale, the information contained within a mini-dictionary is necessarily limited:

hopen. expectation of something desired; something giving grounds for this; something hoped for. • v. feel hope.

Just right

So the first thing to realise about dictionaries is that the information they can give us depends on the size of the dictionary and the purpose for which it was developed. For normal use at home, a single-volume dictionary of 1000–2000 pages is probably the best choice. For example The Concise Oxford Dictionary:

hope • n. 1 a feeling of expectation and desire. > a person or thing that gives cause for hope. > grounds for hoping. 2 archaic a feeling of trust. • v. expect and desire. > intend if possible to do something.
– PHRASES hope against hope cling to a mere possibility. not a (or some) hope informal no chance at all.
– DERIVATIVES hoper n
– ORIGIN OE hopa (n.) hopian (v.), of Gmc origin.

What dictionaries can and cannot tell us

It is important to understand that dictionaries are essentially historical documents. They can only tell us about how words were used in the past; they cannot tell us exactly how they are used now, let alone how they will be used in the future. This apparently odd statement is only common sense. Even the most up-to-date dictionary was only up to date at the time of going to press. Language is in a constant state of flux, and in the gap between when the dictionary goes to press and when the reader consults it, things will have moved on. So, for example, at the time of writing as far as I know none of the following new words is to be found in a printed dictionary:

• plunderphonics
• yotta
• juvenoia
• foodoir
• obesogenic
• chatterati

And this is as it should be: only a few of the new words that are spawned every week will make it into next year, let alone into the next decade. Dictionaries offer us a snapshot of the state of the language at the time when they were prepared. This is why the dictionary departments of major publishers are constantly bringing out new editions of their dictionaries in an attempt to overcome the ravages of time.

plunderphonics noun A musical technique that creates a new piece of music by mixing passages from a number of existing songs.
www.wordspy.com

But there is another sense in which dictionaries are historical documents. Modern dictionaries are ‘constructed upon historical principles’. They recognise that language is not fixed but constantly on the move. Old words die, new words are born, and other words gradually change their meanings. Some words, too, are local and rather rare. A ‘hope’, for example, can mean a piece of enclosed land, but not many people use the word in this way and nowadays it occurs chiefly in place names such as ‘Fownhope’.

So dictionaries can tell us how words have been used in the past and what they meant then. They can tell us which of those meanings were still current at the time the dictionary was written. The extent to which a dictionary provides the details of this historical information will vary according to its size and style. You can see this by comparing the entries for ‘hope’ from The Oxford English Dictionary and The Concise Oxford Dictionary. In the latter the historical information is restricted to the fact that the meaning for ‘hope’ of ‘a feeling of trust’ is ‘archaic’,

Larger dictionaries back up their historical information with:

• etymology
  An explanation of where the word originally came from. This, too, can differ in scope, according to the size of the dictionary.
• quotations
  Examples of real language in which the word is used.

Usage

Some dictionaries also provide examples of how a word is used. This approach to defining a word is most useful for those learning a language, especially foreign learners of English. It is also useful when you want to move a word from your passive to your active vocabulary. For example:

hope 1. If you hope that something is true or hope for something to happen, you want it to be true or to happen and usually believe that it is possible or likely. EG Nothing can be done except to wait, hope, and pray … She hoped she wasn’t going to cry
Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary

The information provided by a dictionary

A good-size dictionary can be expected to provide most or all of the following information.

• Headword
  The word upon which a group of dictionary entries and definitions are based. (So the headword ‘hope’, for example, includes a number of different definitions plus a reference to ‘hope chest’.)
• Pronunciation guide
  The system used to show how words are pronounced is generally explained in a set of notes at the beginning of the dictionary.
• Word class(es)
  Usually given in an abbreviated form: ‘n’ for noun, ‘v’ for verb, and so on.
• Derivation
  An explanation of how the word came into the language.
• Definition(s)
  Many words have more than one meaning or use. These are usually numbered for the sake of clarity.
• Usage notes
  If a particular usage is unusual in some way, this is explained. For example a word may be obsolete (‘obs’) or informal in use (‘inf’).
• Additional information
  This can include word combinations (like ‘hope chest’), and phrases of expressions using the word (e.g. ‘not a hope’).

Useful links

• http://oxforddictionaries.com/
  This is the free gateway to the Oxford University Press subscription site. Although it contains much less than the subscription site, it still offers a lot, including a free dictionary, and sections entitled: ‘Better writing’, ‘World of words’, ‘Puzzles and games’, ‘For children and schools’, and ‘For learners of English’.
• http://www.macmillandictionary.com/
  While not as comprehensive as the free Oxford University Press material, this offers a free dictionary and thesaurus.
• http://www.merriam-webster.com/netdict.htm
  This offers a good quality dictionary and thesaurus and, again, it’s free.

The words you use can communicate personal, social, or political prejudice. Nowhere more so than in the case of words containing ‘man’. If you are careless about your choice of words you can easily fall into the trap pf using language in a sexist, discriminatory way.

In Old English the word ‘man’ meant person, and there were separate words for male person and female person. Of these only ‘woman’ has survived, while ‘man’ has come to mean specifically ‘male person’. If you wish to be even-handed and not discriminate against half the population, you have problems with expressions like these:

There is no single solution to this. A common approach is to replace ‘man’ with ‘person’. This works well for a number of the expressions above: ‘man-to-man’ can be replaced by ‘person-to-person’, for example. In other cases it can appear slightly awkward (‘chairperson’), strange (‘policeperson’), or absurd (‘be one’s own person’). The following are possible alternatives:

He or she?

The other problem that English poses for those who wish to avoid a sexist bias in speech or writing is that it lacks a neuter personal pronoun. How do you fill the gaps in the following sentence so that it applies equally to men and women?

Anyone who wishes to apply for this post must send a copy of ————— CV with details of ————— current salary.

We have only the choice of ‘his’ or ‘her’. One way is to use ‘his or her’ for each space, but this is rather clumsy. A better way is to rewrite the sentence. There are four ways of doing this:

• Turn it into the plural
  Those who wish to apply for this post must send copies of their CVs with details of their current salaries.
• Make it into direct address
  If you wish to apply for this post you must send a copy of your CV with details of your current salary.
• Make it passive
  Applications for this post must be accompanied by a copy of the applicant’s CV and details of current salary.
• Use ‘their’ instead of ‘his’ or ‘her’
  Anyone who wishes to apply for this post must send copies of their CV with details of their current salary.

They all have advantages and disadvantages. The first is slightly awkward because it could be understood that each applicant has more than one CV. The second is accurate, although less formal than some writers would like – but it is an increasingly common approach. The third is very formal and so would not appeal to many writers. The fourth is an increasingly popular solution, although traditionalists disapprove because they argue that ‘their’ must always refer back to more than one person (which ‘anyone’ clearly is not).

In the end it comes down to a question of personal judgement and taste.

Taken from my book about words, Lexis.

In an article about a property, Country Life once famously said that it was ‘almost the most unique residential site on the south coast.’

Purists were horrified. ‘Unique’ means ‘the only one of its kind’ they said. So something can’t be ‘the most unique’. And as for ‘almost the most’ – what’s that supposed to mean?

In fact, people often put words in front of ‘unique’ to add to or change its meaning.You often hear people say that something is ‘very unique’. So why all the fuss?

To explain, we need a little of grammar background. Adjectives can be divided into two groups. most adjectives are what linguists call qualitative. That means that they provide information about the qualities of something or someone. So:

He’s an intelligent man.
I saw a large red car outside their house.
There was a long hairy caterpillar on the leaf.

All the words in bold type are qualitative adjectives.

There’s a smaller group of adjectives that don’t describe qualities. Instead they put things into categories. We call them classifying adjectives. For example:

His wife was pregnant.
She was the German Chancellor.
These countries still have large stocks of nuclear weapons.

All the words in bold type are classifying adjectives.

For more about words check out my book about words, Lexis.

So what’s the difference?

Because qualitative adjectives describe qualities, you can have more or less of the qualities they refer to. So you can put words in front of them to indicate this:

He’s a most intelligent man.
He’s an extremely intelligent man.
He’s a fairly intelligent man. 

and so on. These modifiers, as they are called, have a big impact on the meaning of the adjective they are attached to – as you can see.

But it doesn’t really make sense to try to modify classifying adjectives, which is obvious as soon as you try to do so:

His wife was slightly pregnant.
She was the extremely German Chancellor.
These countries still have large stocks of fairly nuclear weapons.

And of course ‘unique is a classifying adjective – which is the grammatical reason why you can’t put words in front of out to modify it.

But…

(There’s always a ‘but’ in grammar.) There are often special circumstances in which people do modify classifying adjectives and it still makes sense. For example, if  you wanted to stereotype national types, you could say that someone was ‘very German’, or that someone from England was ‘more French than the French’. Or you could say that a woman was looking ‘very pregnant’. In these cases we have transformed a classifying adjective into a qualitative one. We are saying that ‘French’, for example, means having the qualities that many people associate with the French.

Et voilà!

For more about words check out my book about words,  Lexis.