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:
- a
- an
- the
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:
- Do not capitalize articles in a title (unless the article is the first word of the title).
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:
- The dog barked.
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