NOUNS

You need nouns to name things. Easy. Nouns are the most common part of speech in English, for that simple reason.

People who study language and sort words into groups have come up with five different types of nouns. The main reason that classification is useful is because we treat some types of nouns differently from others. (As we're only at the beginning, you'll have to wait and see how this unfolds.)

The five types of nouns

1 Common nouns are basic names for things: feet, legs, knees, pants, shirt, neck, head, hat, brain, table, fridge, house, cat, gum. Look around, there are plenty for you to pick.

2 Proper nouns are specific: they name a single thing, and for doing that they are awarded a capital letter. Australia, Gerald, Government, Westmead Hospital, New South Wales, Ms Duffy. The capital letter matters. If you can't be bothered to use one, then it's 'goodbye marks' and 'hello embarrassing myself'.

3 Collective nouns refer to a group. A school of fish, an audience, a flock of sheep, a gang of robbers. Be careful here. A collective noun makes many things into one, a single collection, so the language around them should show this. 'A flock of sheep is lost on the hillside', not 'are lost on the hillside'. It's one whole flock that IS lost, not the many sheep that ARE within it. 'The gang of robbers was arrested.' (There was only one gang.) 'The audience is on its feet', not 'are on their feet'. (There is only one audience.)

At least, that's what some people will tell you. Others will say that it's OK to use the plural because we are talking about multiple things. 'That flock of sheep are lost', and 'the gang of robbers were arrested'. Listen to the people around you and see what they do in this case. It's probably OK to follow along. The audience for this book is going to have to decide for itself / themselves.

4 Abstract nouns name things that you can't see or touch, or find anywhere in the real world. These are intangible things (from the Latin word tangere, meaning 'to touch'). Emotions, feelings and ideas, like love, success, sadness, interest, favour, anger and joy are all abstract nouns. Because many children have been taught that a noun is the name for a person, place or thing, and they don't realise that 'misery' and 'hope' are things too (just things you can't touch), spotting abstract nouns can be a challenge.

5 Compound nouns occur when we use two words to create one noun. The words that are joined don't have to be nouns, and the new noun can either be written as two words or one. That can cause confusion. Examples are washing machine, skipping rope, greenhouse, software, input. There may be two words in there, but once they've been joined to refer to a single thing, they're one noun.

So that's it for the five basic types of nouns. Now for the extras.

6 Gerunds are so cool. They are my very favourite thing. They are a special, unique breed, with a bit of noun and a bit of verb.

Look at this sentence: 'Dancing is fun, but I also love kayaking'. Now ask yourself: are those 'ing' words nouns (because they name things?) or verbs (because they're action words?). Hard to tell, isn't it?

The answer is that they're called gerunds, and they're nouns. But I like to think of them as hybrids, or 'half and half'. They always end in 'ing'.

Singular and plural

Nouns have two versions or 'forms': singular (just one thing) or plural (more than one thing). I'm guessing you already know that. Mostly we make plurals in English by adding an 's', but there are so many exceptions to that statement that we could probably spend the rest of the book listing them. Here are some examples – just a taster – of some complicated irregular plurals.

man – men

mouse – mice

child – children

tooth – teeth

knife – knives

fungus – fungi

moose – moose

tomato – tomatoes

crisis – crises

criterion – criteria

sheep – sheep

radius – radii

It's a good idea to search online for yourself, as the internet is awash with lists of this type. Make sure that you know the correct plurals of the words you like to use.

Noun phrases

Sometimes, when a group of words works together as if it were a noun, we call that a noun phrase. It's hard to show these out of context, but phrases like 'The important documents' or 'Aunt Sally's cat' are both multi-word nouns. They name things. Don't get too worried about this – we don't need to work with noun phrases yet and I will explain them fully later in the book.

Nominalisation

This is nothing but a fancy way of saying 'making a noun out of something that wasn't'. It is useful, especially when you want to write in a formal way.

• The colour of the leaves changes as autumn comes.

• The change in the leaves' colour is because autumn comes.

Change was a verb the first time round, but is a noun in the rewrite.

Writing well with nouns

Because you need nouns to name things, nouns create a sense of what those things are like: how they look, sound, feel, taste and smell. You should build a healthy vocabulary so you have a good range of nouns to choose from.

1. Well-chosen, precise nouns convey lots of information, making your writing more interesting and varied. They create a clear, vivid scene in the mind of your reader, and they impress markers.

For example, don't say 'bird' if you can say 'magpie' (or 'sparrow' or 'kookaburra' or whatever works in context). Maybe the garden you're describing is full of 'trees and flowers', but the reader will get one idea if they are 'oaks and daffodils', and quite another if they are 'gums and bottlebrush'.

Your character might fall into the water, but was it the sea, a pond, a river, a puddle, a lake or the dam on the farm? Each of those words will create a completely different scene in the mind of the reader.

2 Precise nouns also let you know when and where something is happening: 'Across the lawn he heard the distant sound of a gramophone.'

Gramophone tells us that we're in the early twentieth century, and are probably at a posh, grand sort of place – nice...