The Effective Use of Determiners and Quantifiers

We use determiners all the time. Most of the time, we don’t even realize that we are using them. Determiners can be used in a general or specific manner. It really depends on the writing form you are using. The effective use of determiners is to add specificity to your writing. They point out certain qualities that were not part of sentence before they were present. Any example sentence for a specific use could be: That is the bus we need to be on. In this sentence, the word "that" is the determiner. It is telling which specific bus that group needs to board.

Quantifiers are a bit different because they let us know how many or how much something is. The words "several, many, and few" are examples of quantifiers. By using those words we have a relative understand of the quantity present. I used the word "relative" to describe quantifiers because to perceptions of amount differ person to person. I four-hundred pound linebacker is going to think very differently about the size of his cheeseburger than a one hundred pound grandmother of 3. When we are writing and using quantifiers we need to aware of that.

Quantifiers can take on many different shapes whether it be in word form or a specific numeric value. Their basic job is to communicate to your audience the significance of the noun. There are some nouns that can be seen as uncountable because a specific value cannot be attributed to them, but you give a general sense of the value in a nonspecific way. Here are two examples: