The names of seasons (e.g., ‘spring’) are treated as common nouns in English and therefore not capitalised. People often assume they are proper nouns, but this is an error.
The names of days and months, however, are capitalised since they’re treated as proper nouns in English (e.g., ‘Wednesday’, ‘January’).
A noun is a word that represents a person, thing, concept, or place (e.g., ‘John’, ‘house’, ‘affinity’, ‘river’). Most sentences contain at least one noun or pronoun.
Nouns are often, but not always, preceded by an article (‘the’, ‘a’, or ‘an’) and/or another determiner such as an adjective.
There are many ways to categorize nouns into various types, and the same noun can fall into multiple categories or even change types depending on context.
Some of the main types of nouns are:
Pronouns are words like ‘I’, ‘she’, and ‘they’ that are used in a similar way to nouns. They stand in for a noun that has already been mentioned or refer to yourself and other people.
Pronouns can function just like nouns as the head of a noun phrase and as the subject or object of a verb. However, pronouns change their forms (e.g., from ‘I’ to ‘me’) depending on the grammatical context they’re used in, whereas nouns usually don’t.
Common nouns are words for types of things, people, and places, such as ‘dog’, ‘professor’, and ‘city’. They are not capitalised and are typically used in combination with articles and other determiners.
Proper nouns are words for specific things, people, and places, such as ‘Max’, ‘Dr Prakash’, and ‘London’. They are always capitalised and usually aren’t combined with articles and other determiners.
A proper adjective is an adjective that was derived from a proper noun and is therefore capitalised.
Proper adjectives include words for nationalities, languages, and ethnicities (e.g., ‘Japanese’, ‘Inuit’, ‘French’) and words derived from people’s names (e.g., ‘Bayesian’, ‘Orwellian’).
No, as a general rule, academic concepts, disciplines, theories, models, etc. are treated as common nouns, not proper nouns, and therefore not capitalised. For example, ‘five-factor model of personality’ or ‘analytic philosophy’.
However, proper nouns that appear within the name of an academic concept (such as the name of the inventor) are capitalised as usual. For example, ‘Darwin’s theory of evolution’ or ‘Student’s t table‘.
Collective nouns are most commonly treated as singular (e.g., ‘the herd is grazing’), but usage differs between US and UK English:
The plural of “crisis” is “crises”. It’s a loanword from Latin and retains its original Latin plural noun form (similar to “analyses” and “bases”). It’s wrong to write “crisises”.
For example, you might write “Several crises destabilized the regime.”
Normally, the plural of “fish” is the same as the singular: “fish”. It’s one of a group of irregular plural nouns in English that are identical to the corresponding singular nouns (e.g., “moose”, “sheep”). For example, you might write “The fish scatter as the shark approaches.”
If you’re referring to several species of fish, though, the regular plural “fishes” is often used instead. For example, “The aquarium contains many different fishes, including trout and carp.”
The correct plural of “octopus” is “octopuses”.
People often write “octopi” instead because they assume that the plural noun is formed in the same way as Latin loanwords such as “fungus/fungi”. But “octopus” actually comes from Greek, where its original plural is “octopodes”. In English, it instead has the regular plural form “octopuses”.
For example, you might write “There are four octopuses in the aquarium.”
The plural of “moose” is the same as the singular: “moose”. It’s one of a group of plural nouns in English that are identical to the corresponding singular nouns. So it’s wrong to write “mooses”.
For example, you might write “There are several moose in the forest.”
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You might be familiar with a different set of editing terms. To help you understand what you can expect at Scribbr, we created this table:
| Types of editing | Available at Scribbr? |
|---|---|
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Yes! This is the “proofreading” in Scribbr’s standard service. It can only be selected in combination with editing. |
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Good academic writing should be understandable to a non-expert reader, and we believe that academic editing is a discipline in itself. The research, ideas and arguments are all yours – we’re here to make sure they shine!
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The editor has made changes to your document using ‘Track Changes’ in Word. This means that you only have to accept or ignore the changes that are made in the text one by one.
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You choose the turnaround time when ordering. We can return your dissertation within 24 hours, 3 days or 1 week. These timescales include weekends and holidays. As soon as you’ve paid, the deadline is set, and we guarantee to meet it! We’ll notify you by text and email when your editor has completed the job.
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If you don’t choose one, your editor will follow the style of English you currently use. If your editor has any questions about this, we will contact you.