Grammar 3

 

Articles

There are only three articles in the English language. (No, we're not talking about newspaper articles; we're talking about grammatical articles).

Here they are:

Why It's Important

We mostly talk about articles in the context of capitalizing titles or simplifying sentences.

Capitalizing Titles

There are rules about the proper way to capitalize titles, and one of them is this:

Wrong Correct
The Bite of An Apple The Bite of an Apple
The Sound of The Sea The Sound of the Sea
The Day I Saw A Ghost The Day I Saw a Ghost

Simplifying Sentences

When simplifying sentences, articles should always be canceled or ignored or "clumped together" with the noun that they precede. In other words:

Let's imagine we're analyzing the following sentence:

We don't want to think of this as a 3-part sentence (even though it consists of three different words). Instead, we want to think of "the dog" as just one thing (the subject of the sentence).

Visually, think of it like this:

1 2
The dog barked

Instead of like this:

1 2 3
The dog barked

Instructions for the Quiz

Identify the article.

Quiz