Did you ever play Mad Libs as a kid? If you did, you remember filling in nouns, verbs and adjectives to make up wacky stories. But you might not remember what those words mean.
Based on readers’ questions over the past few weeks, I’m launching a new series defining grammatical terms. We’ll start with the basics and then move on to more obscure terms like predicates, conjunctions and gerunds.
I hope I haven’t lost you with those. Bear with me and in a week or so, you, too, will be able to speak like Mrs. Johnson from eighth grade English class.
Nouns: Every story needs a subject
Noun – A noun is a person, place or thing. It’s as simple as that. Nouns, which often DO things, are frequently the “subjects” of sentences. In other words, the subject is what’s “doing” something in a sentence.
Plural noun – one or more of the same noun.
Ex: Writers contribute to this blog.
Pronouns – A part of speech that refers to a specific noun. If you can replace a noun with another word and the sentence still makes sense, that word is a pronoun. Examples of pronouns include:
She
He
It
They
We
This
That
The writers over at Moms Who Think put together a handy and comprehensive list of pronouns. http://www.momswhothink.com/reading/list-of-pronouns.html#pronoun%20list
Proper noun – A proper noun is a formal name for something. Proper nouns include companies, states, towns and cities, specific regions, months, days, people or pet’s names, team names, etc.
Ex: state = noun
New York = proper noun
Proper nouns are capitalized.
Sometimes this is confusing, especially when you are using words as people’s names, such as Grandmother or Mom. If you could substitute the person’s given name and have the sentence mean the same thing, you would capitalize the title or designation.
For instance:
“What would you like for lunch, Mom?” could easily be: “What would you like for lunch, Dawn?”
You wouldn’t say, “I went to lunch with my Dawn.” But my daughter might say, “I went to lunch with my mom.” – (not capitalized). And then I’d be very impressed since she’s not even 18 months old!
Geographical regions follow a similar rule.
“I didn’t realize we were heading south until we hit Virginia. It’s too bad the party was in the Midwest.”
Midwest is a region, so it’s capitalized. South is a direction, so it’s not. We would, however, capitalize south if we were referring to the region.
“You have to go to the South if you want authentic sweet tea.”
Any questions? Tune in next week when we jump right into the action with verbs.
