Hello everybody, welcome back to my channel Sparkle English where
I teach you how to improve your level of English so you can
become a better English speaker or writer. Today's video is
another one of my series English writing essentials. And I'm
going to talk to you about capitalization. I'm going to go
over all the different rules of when you know to use an
uppercase or capital letter instead of a lowercase or small
letter.
So in this lesson, we are going to discuss rules related to
capitalization in English. This means I'll teach you when to use
capital or uppercase letters in a word or sentence. So for
example, A, B, and C. These are all capital letters, or
uppercase letters, as opposed to a, b, and c, which are lowercase
letters.
So rule number one, always capitalize the first word of a
sentence. So whenever you start a new sentence, you always have
to capitalize the first word. So for example, the man worked late
last night.
Why are you looking at me? Let's go to the cinema. Should we get
a coffee? You'll notice that the first word is capitalized in
each and every one of these sentences.
So every time you end a sentence with whatever punctuation mark,
whether it's a period, or a question mark, when you begin a
new sentence, you have to capitalize the first word. So if
this sentence was the man worked late last night, you would have
a period and the next sentence could be capital W, where was
he? For example.
The second rule is you always need to capitalize names and
other proper nouns. So always capitalize proper nouns in
English. And if you don't know what a proper noun is, a proper
noun is a specific, so not a generic name for a particular
person, place or thing.
Proper nouns are always capitalized in English, no
matter where they fall in a sentence.
The names of cities, countries, nationalities, companies,
religions, and political parties are also proper nouns. So you
should capitalize them too. So for example, a common noun would
be girl. A proper noun would be a name of a girl. So for
example, Jennifer, you would have to capitalize the J in
Jennifer, a common noun would be a city, proper noun. Toronto is
the name of the city. So you have to capitalize the T
a day, Friday, again with a capital A month, December.
A nationality Canadian religion, Christian, okay. So for common
nouns, you do not have to capitalize girl city, day,
month, nationality, religion, but a proper noun, you do have
to capitalize when it is a specific name for a particular
person, place or thing.
So here are some more examples. She lives in India.
Again, the she is capitalized because it's the first word of
the sentence. and India we have to capitalize because it's the
name of a country. I saw Michael at this Chinese restaurant in
London.
Chinese is a nationality. Michael is a name. And this is
the first letter of the sentence and also it's the word I which
we always capitalize. Do you have to work on Friday, my
meeting is in June.
My meeting is in June.
Lauren works at Amazon. Amazon is the name of a company so you
have to capitalize the name because it's a proper noun.
So again, like we said before, you have to capitalize cities,
countries, nationalities, and languages because they are all
proper nouns. So you can see all of these examples of cities,
Paris, Rome, New York, Vancouver, Dubai. We have to
capitalize all these because their countries, Canada, China,
India, Pakistan, we have to capitalize nationalities,
Canadian, Australian, Japanese, Dutch, and we have to capitalize
languages as well. English, French, Spanish.
Now this one gets a little bit more complicated. We have to
capitalize the first word of a quote, when the quote is a
complete sentence. So for example, Joe asked, Have a
comma, quotation marks is Brian going to the meeting on Friday.
So because this quote is a complete sentence, we have to
capitalize the first word of the quote, again, he can't go. He's
busy that night, Mary replied. Again, we would capitalize this
because it's the first word of the quote. And this is a full
sentence.
Okay, now this is what you should not capitalize, do not
capitalize seasons, a lot of people make a mistake and
capitalize the seasons. And of course the seasons are
spring, summer,
fall or autumn, and winter. So the names of days, months and
holidays are proper nouns, so you should capitalize them. So
for example, I don't like Valentine's Day, you would
capitalize the V and Valentine's and the D and day because that's
the name of the holidays Valentine's Day. My birthday is
in March. capitalize this because it's a month. I start
work on Monday. we capitalize the end because it's a day of
the week.
However, we never capitalize seasons, unless it was the start
of a sentence. So I enjoy Christmas every winter, winter,
no capital letter lowercase. My favorite thing about the Fall is
Halloween. Again, we capitalize the sea and Christmas because
it's a holiday. we capitalize the H and Halloween because it's
a holiday. It's a proper noun. And I love spring.
Again, lowercase letter because we do not capitalize seasons.
Okay, rule number five. we capitalize most words in titles.
The capitalization rules for titles of books, movies, and
other works can change depending on style guides. Generally, you
should capitalize the first word all nouns, verbs, adjectives,
and proper nouns. That means you should lowercase articles,
conjunctions, and prepositions. But here's a note, some style
guides say to capitalize conjunctions and prepositions
that are longer than five letters. Okay? So here's some
examples. I love watching The Lord of the Rings. So we're
going to capitalize this first t in the because it is the first
word of the title. So we have to capitalize it. If it's a title,
we have to capitalize the first word, then we capitalize Lord,
because it's a noun, of the rings. Also, we capitalized
rings because it's a noun, but we would not capitalize of and
the. We do not capitalize articles, conjunctions, and
prepositions. Okay.
So look here, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. We don't
capitalize and. Again, it's a conjunction, the, because it's
an article, and then of because it's a preposition. So we only
capitalize these names Harry Potter, and the Goblet of Fire
because they're nouns. My favorite show is Game of
Thrones. Again, capitalize this and this, because they are nouns
and also this is the first word
of the title. And we do not capitalize of because it's a
preposition.
Okay, number six, always capitalize the pronoun I. A
common mistake of English language learners is to forget
to capitalize the pronoun I. Examples, Larry is going to
order fish and I am going to order steak. You always always
have to capitalize, I you should never have a sentence with an
eye like this. As a word, you could not say, I am tired. You
always have to capitalize this and make this a capital always.
Do you think I should talk to her? Again capitalized. We
should go but I'll call you later on. Again, this is
capitalized. I'll.. If you say I'm, I'll, I'd...
all of these should be capital I, okay. Always capitalize the
pronoun, I.
Now, capitalize the official title of a person when used with
that person's name. So what that means, before we were talking
about titles like titles of books, or movies or articles,
now we're talking about the official title of a person. So
for example, Doctor, Mr. Professor. So look at this first
sentence, I think Dr. Smith is really friendly and
professional. So we would capitalize the doctor like this
with a capital D, because we're using the title right before his
name. If we had the full version and wrote Doctor Smith like
this, we would still capitalize the D. Because it's used with
his name, we're specifying what Dr.
Because that would be a proper noun, we're saying Dr. Smith,
okay.
But then if someone responded and said, Yes, she is a great
doctor, we would not capitalize this D, because this would just
be a general, a common noun. She's a great doctor. We're not
referring to her as her title as Dr. Smith.
Okay, the next one, many people miss President Obama. We're
using the official title right before his name. Well, I guess
now he's not President Obama, but a lot of people will still
call him that. So we would capitalize the P, because it's
the official title of Obama, President Obama. And then if you
said, I don't like our current president, we would not
capitalize the P here, because this is a common noun. We're not
using this word with the name of the President. Okay. Other
titles, you would always have to capitalize, you would see a lot,
mister. For example, Mr. Thomas, would always capitalize the Mr.
like this, Miss Smith, Mrs.
Ms,
and so forth.
Okay, and now it's time for us to do some practice and see what
you have learned. So I have four different sentences here. And I
have put no capital letters in any of these sentences. What I
would like you to do is take a piece of paper, or just go into
the YouTube comment section, and try to write out the sentences
capitalizing the proper letters, or just on a piece of paper,
besides your computer or your phone, jot down which letters
you think should be capitalized or which words should be
capitalized. Okay, so I'm going to read you all the sentences,
and then I want you to try to capitalize them correctly. You
can go back in the video and try to refresh your memory for
certain things. And then I'll tell you the answers at the end.
Okay. Joe asked, What is everyone doing on Friday.
His birthday is in October in the fall.
My favorite book is Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
She is English, but she speaks French perfectly.
Okay, you can pause the video if you want to take some time to
think which should be capitalized. And I'm going to go
ahead and show you right now what you should capitalize in
these sentences. So Joe should be capitalized.
Joe. First of all, it's the first word in a sentence. So it
should always be capitalized. But Joe is also a name a proper
noun, so you always have to capitalize a name.
The next one we should capitalize is what? That's
because it's the first word in a quote in a complete and a quote.
That's a complete sentence. So we have to capitalize the W. And
the last one is F for Friday, because we capitalize the days
of the week.
The next one,
we capitalize his because it's the first word in a sentence.
capitalize the O and October because it's a month. We do not
capitalize the F in fall because remember, it's a season.
The next one, we capitalize m because it's the first word in a
sentence.
And now here we have a title Pride and Prejudice. We're going
to capitalize the P. This is the first word of the title. We're
going to capitalize this P because it is the last word of
the title. And also because it's a noun. Pride and Prejudice by
Jane Austen capitalized the J and the A because that is the
author's name.
Her name.
The last sentence we capitalize the essence she, again because
it's the first word of the sentence. And now we're going to
capitalize the E in English because this is a nationality.
She is English, but she speaks French perfectly. We're going to
say capital F for French because that is a language.
So there were 13 words that we had to capitalize in this, let
me know how many you got out of 13 and you can put that in the
comment section. And let me know which ones you didn't get right
which ones you did get right and how successful you were with
this practice.
So thank you once again for watching this video. I hope you
enjoyed it and I hope you learn something. Make sure to
subscribe to my channel Sparkle English for more ESL videos and
more videos on helping you improve your punctuation, your
writing skills, your speaking skills, your listening skills. I
also have other videos in this series of my English writing
essentials, where I teach you how to use commas how to use
apostrophes quotation marks and I have many more videos in the
works for this section as well. Thank you once again for
watching and I will see you in my next lesson.