English Grammar Rules & Mistakes: Learn All of the Essentials: Writing, Speaking, Literature and Punctuation Rules Complete with 10 Key Skills and Over 200 Common Error Examples

The naming block: understanding nouns
Everyone deserves a name and boy do we have a lot of them! In fact,
humankind is rather obsessed with naming everything! We have named the
furthest star and the smallest of creatures found at the bottom of the ocean. 
As names are so very important to us, you will see them coming up in nearly
all the sentences that you write. The naming building block of language is
called a noun. We will take a look at how nouns are identified now. What is
key to keep in mind is that nouns can name anything including people,
animals, places, things, and ideas.
My dog is small.
In this example, the noun is a dog who happens to be small. It is easy to find
the noun is the case.
My dog is a Chihuahua. 
However, in this example, there are two nouns. The first one is the dog and
the second one is the Chihuahua. Very often, there is more than one noun in
a sentence, remember what I said about our love of naming things. 
You might notice that on one of the nouns there is no capitalization, whereas
on the other there is. We will go into capitalization in detail further on in this
book. For now, what I want you to know is that the reason dog is not
capitalized is because it is considered a common noun. Common nouns are
the names we give to everyday things that we talk about all the time. They
might be cats, cars, cauliflowers, croissants, but they are not Christmas. That
is because like Chihuahua, Christmas is a proper noun. These types of nouns
have capital letters because they are not considered common and are talking
about a specific thing. Remember it this way, a dog can be lots of different
types of dogs but a Chihuahua can only ever be a Chihuahua. That is what is

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meant to be specific.
What is more, the two different nouns have two different functions in the
sentence. Firstly, the noun dog is acting as the subject in the sentence. What
this means is that the sentence is about the dog being a Chihuahua. It is not
about any dog or any Chihuahua. It is specifically about it being that dog.
Secondly, the noun Chihuahua is acting as the object in the sentence. This is
because the dog being talked about in the sentence is not just any dog, it is
specifically a Chihuahua. 
We just learned about verbs, and in this sentence, the verb is the helping verb
is. If we then analyze the whole sentence, we can see that it is broken down
into three main parts.
Subject + Verb + Object
My dog + is + a Chihuahua
This structure is a very common sentence structure that we use in English.
However, I must admit that it can become a bit complicated to start to think
about writing in terms of structure as well as having to consider using the
different building blocks such as verbs and nouns. What is most important is
to recognize how the majority of sentences should be written without
worrying too much about what the different parts are called.
When writing, you have to write about something, this is what we call the
subject. This something has to be doing something, this is what we call the
verb. Then, the something doing something is probably doing something that
has a name as well, this is what we call the object. So the something being
talked about in this sentence is the dog. The dog is doing something and that
is being something. What that dog is being is a Chihuahua.

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You can apply this to lots of sentences you write to be able to understand if
you are using your nouns correctly. Just check that you understand who is
being talked about, that you know what they are doing and what the name is
of what they are doing. Sounds simple, hey!