#1 Capitalizing Sentences (first word in each sentence) Quotations (He said, "Why did you come back?") Special cases for capitalizing (first word of each sentence in Poetry, "I", first word that follows a colon) Proper nouns (specific person, place, or thing) Proper Adjectives (proper noun used as an adjective or an adjective formed from a proper noun is called a proper adjective) Personal Titles ( Dr., Jr., Sr. Pastor, High ranking officials like the President, the Queen, the Chief Justice) Letters (Dear Sir, Yours truly, Greetings, Sincerely) Scientific Nomenclature (The Latin - derived scientific names are capitalized except for the specific and sub specificnames. Modifiers describe a word or make the meaning of the word more specific. They are said to modify the word. #2 Parts of Speech The part of speech is the term used to describe how a particular word is used. In English there are eight ways a word can be used--there are eight parts of speech. 1. Nouns name anything 2. Verbs express action or state of being 3. Pronouns replace nouns 4. Adjectives modify nouns or pronouns 5. Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs 6. Prepositions show the relationship between a noun or pronoun and another word in the sentence. 7. Conjunctions connect words and sentence parts. 8. Interjections express strong feeling. #4 Principal Parts of a Verb: The principal parts of a verb are the four-forms of the verb from which all forms of the verb can be made. In English the four principal parts are the present (or infinitive), the past tense, the past participle, and the present participle. To run run run running To run is considered an irregular verb since one or more of the principal parts is formed in a nonstandard way. Because the present participle is always formed the same way by adding -ing to the infinitive, some lists of principal parts omit it. #5 Noun and Pronoun Case The case of a noun or pronoun in English is that form of a word which shows its relationship to other words in the sentence. The three cased in English are nominative (for subjects and predicate nominatives), objective (for direct objects, indirect objects, objects of prepositions, object complements, and subjects of infinitives), and possessive. In all English nouns and indefinite pronouns, there is no difference between the form of the nominative and the form of the objective. #6 Punctuation Punctuation is the visual sign which helps a reader distinguish between words and sentences and helps the reader understand the relationships between words. Technically, capitalizing, spaces between words, and indentations at the start of paragraphs are all forms of punctuation. But usually when we speak of punctuation, we speak of the symbols we use to make sentences--the punctuation marks. They help the reader understand exactly what the writer's intentions are. Period, question mark, exclamation point, comma, semicolon, colon, quotation marks, single quotation marks, italics, underlining, dash, hyphen, parentheses, brackets, ellipsis, and virgule.