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).

We'll talk more about titles in a future lesson.

Simplifying Sentences

When simplifying sentences, articles should always be cancelled or ignored or "clumped together" with the noun that they preceed. 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), and that "thing" is performing an action (that is, it's barking).

In short, if I were to ask you, "How many parts (or elements) are there in that sentence?" The answer is "two" (not three).

Instructions for the Quiz

Identify the article.