Elementary Writing Skills: How to Write with Subjects and Nouns

Writing with Subjects and Nouns

What Are Nouns?

Nouns are the people, places or things you find in sentences. In order to write a proper sentence, you'll always need to include at least one noun. In addition, one of the nouns you use in a sentence must have a verb or action that relates to it. There are also different categories of nouns for you to use, which are explained below.

Common nouns

Nouns that refer to people, places and things in general. They are not capitalized. Examples of these include books, stars, crackers and girls.

Proper nouns

Nouns that refer to specific people, places and things, such as someone's first or last name, names of states or days of the week. The first letter of these types of nouns must be capitalized. Examples include Tommy, Texas and Wednesday.

Concrete nouns

Any nouns that can be identified by using your five senses (hearing, touching, tasting, smelling and seeing). Some examples are tacos, cats, water, sand, etc.

Abstract nouns

Any nouns that cannot be identified by using your five senses, such as justice, childhood and fairness.

Collective nouns

Nouns that name a group of people, animals or things (e.g., herd, crowd, flock and pack).

Possessive nouns

Nouns that show ownership of something else or a close relationship to it. To change a noun to the possessive form, you'll add an 's at the end. For instance, that's Bobby's car, the cat's yarn and Sarah's blanket.

What Are Subjects?

Subjects are the people, places or things that are doing the actions in a sentence. They are who or what the sentence is about. Subjects are nouns, and therefore, they must have a verb that relates to them in a sentence. Consider the following sentence.

The fox jumped.

In this sentence, fox is a noun, and it is also the subject of the sentence. Jumped is the verb the describes what the subject did.

To make the sentence interesting, you may want to use adjectives (words that describe) to give more detail about the subject. For instance, you could write, 'The fluffy fox jumped.' It's also helpful to know the difference between simple and complete subjects.

Simple Subjects

A simple subject is the subject of a sentence without any describing details attached to it. For example, in the sample sentence below, the word bike is the simple subject. To find the simple subject, you ignore the adjectives.

The shiny, new bike was waiting for Johnny on Christmas morning.

Complete Subjects

A complete subject is the subject of a sentence with the describing details included. Using the same sample sentence above the complete subject is the shiny, new bike.