Nouns: Common Nouns v. Proper Nouns

Nouns are words that represent people, places or things.  The name you give anything you can touch (and a lot of things that you can) is probably a noun.  Look around you.  Do you see a pencil? Paper? A phone? Glasses?  A human?  All of those words, pencil, paper, phone, glasses, human, are nouns.

There are two main kinds of nouns.

There are common nouns, which represent general things, like glasses, football, and boy.

There are also proper nouns, which give the proper names of specific things like Ray-Bans, The Oakland Raiders, and Justin. Proper nouns refer to specific items and they are capitalized. When a noun is correctly capitalized, it is a proper noun.  If a name refers to a specific person, place, or thing, it should be capitalized (and it is a proper noun). 

Every proper noun has a common noun that is the generic version of that proper noun:

When you write, use common nouns to talking about things in general, but use proper nouns to get specific:

People can get help from a tutor (common) at a learning center (common) in their home city (common).  

But we recommend tutoring from Sunny (proper) at EdBoost Learning Center (proper) in Los Angeles (proper).