How to choose a better word than 'BLUE'.

When children learn to spice up their adjectives for 11+ writing tasks, colour is always a favourite.

We can teach how to replace the unspecific adjective ‘blue’, with shades of blues using compound colours, such as azure-blue or butterfly-blue.

But it’s also worth remembering that the ‘blue’ adjective can be dropped from some compound colours if the first adjective makes sense by itself. This can make sentence meaning more concise.

 For example, take ‘cerulean’.

Cerulean means deep blue in colour, and it's often associated with the sky.

We could write ...

 The cerulean-blue sky held secrets from the past.

Or we could write ...

 The cerulean sky held secrets from the past.

However, this doesn’t work with all compound colour adjectives. For example, butterfly-blue must be hyphenated because removing the blue and leaving the butterfly would be confusing.

Here's an example using a compound colour ...

 The sun rose in the butterfly-blue sky.

Here's an example if we take away ‘blue’ ...

 The sun rose in the butterfly sky.

You can see that this now means something very different to the colour of the sky and points more towards the movement or behaviour of the sky.

Task to try at home

Write three sentences using ‘cerulean’.

Remember, the definition of ‘cerulean’ is deep blue in colour.

Sentence 1: Write about a cerulean sky.

Sentence 2: Write about the depths of a cerulean ocean.

Sentence 3: Write about someone with a cold, cerulean heart.

Happy writing!

Anna