Lesson 20: Capitalization

Objectives:

• To define when it’s appropriate to capitalize
• To demonstrate how capitalization is used in a sentence

Capitalization refers to using a capital letter for the first letter of a word. For example, jane doesn’t exhibit capitalization but Jane does. There are four main instances in the English language when capitalization is appropriate. First is the first letter in the first word of every sentence. It is also important to capitalize when you’re referring to a proper noun—proper nouns include people, places, events, months, things and establishments. The pronoun “I” is also always capitalized. Finally, it is important to capitalize when referring to someone’s title—Dr., Atty. and Mr. and other such titles should all be capitalized.

Below, we’ll study some examples of how capitalization is used in sentences.

Ex:

 At the beginning of a sentence

She as looking for her necklace. It was in the cabinet. She looked everywhere but there.

If you think you can do something, then you should try it out. But if you don’t, then just let it slide.

Proper nouns

Jennifer was born in October, her sister was born in June.

The National Arts Festival is about to begin.

Let’s meet up at Glorietta.

Titles

Dear Mr. Freud,

She was telling Dr. Johnson that she hadn’t been feeling well all week.

In this lesson, we learned about when we should capitalize words. This is very important when learning about basic English grammar because it keeps the person reading our work from getting confused. Also, when writing formal letters, capitalizing names and titles is the respectful thing to do—learning capitalization will also avoid offending people unnecessarily.

In our next and last lesson under this class, we’ll be studying sentences. We’ll be studying what defines a sentence, what the different types of sentences are the instances in which they should be used. We’ll also be looking at different examples of different kinds of sentences.