Which sentence do you think is correct?

 Justin Bieber, the Canadian famous young pop singer, performed in Jakarta in April.

Justin Bieber, the young Canadian famous pop singer, performed in Jakarta in April.

Justin Bieber, the famous young Canadian pop singer, performed in Jakarta in April.

Well, do you find it difficult to choose the correct one? Don’t worry. You will certainly do it easily if you know the secret behind it, which is the rule in forming noun phrase or word order. Let’s check the rule below: 

                                        Physical Description

  1                    2                 3         4         5       6                7            8         9           10

Determiner  Observation     Size     Shape   Age   Colour        Origin     Material  qualifier   Noun

Examples:

  1. a nice young woman (determiner-observation-age-headword)

  2. four old Mandarin songs (determiner-age-origin-headword)

  3. those big square plastic boxes (determiner-size-shape-material-headword)

  4. some old French writing desks (determiner-age-origin-qualifier-headword)

  5. my huge red Italian car (determiner-size-colour-origin-headword)

Now, let’s practise.

Correct the following noun phrases:

Jumbled word order                                  Corrected into

thin long arms                                       long thin arms

a young tall handsome actor                    a handsome tall young actor

a party pink beautiful dress                     a beautiful pink party dress 

Javanese young slender girls                   slender young Javanese girls

tall school strong boys                            strong tall schoolboys

blue round big eyes                               big round blue eyes

a black metal small container                   a small black metal container

marital complicated serious problems        complicated marital problems

the film Indonesian industry                    the Indonesian film industry

a thick grammar English good book           a good thick English grammar book

Easy, isn’t it? And now I am sure you will choose the third sentence about Justin Bieber as the correct one. Good job!