Cohesion and Clarity
12- 28
Review of Nouns
Nouns are names of people, places, things, and ideas. In English, nouns are either common or proper . Most nouns are common nouns.
Common: mouse, hospitals
Mickey Mouse Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Proper:
Common Nouns
Common nouns name things, conditions, ideas, etc. They have two main features: they can be count (singular and plural) or noncount, and they can be indefinite (general) or definite (specific). injection, response, cell, efficacy
Count and Noncount
Count
Count nouns can be counted — that is, they can be singular or plural .
Plural nouns in English generally end in s, es , or ies. array/arrays, class/classes, antibody/antibodies
Some nouns have an irregular plural form: mouse/mice, hypothesis/hypotheses, datum/data, phenomenon/phenomena, bacterium/bacteria
A few nouns that end in s, es, or ies are singular or noncount, not plural: measles Measles is a serious disease. series The series of tests was completed.
Some words are plural only:
scissors The scissors are broken. pants His pants were clean.
Noncount
Noncount nouns (also called mass nouns) cannot be counted and thus do not have singular and plural forms. pain, air, time, physics, neutropenia, oncology, scanning
Noncount nouns typically fall into certain categories:
Fields of study: physics, oncology, medicine Diseases and conditions: measles, diabetes, nausea Drugs: lorazepam/Ativan, doxorubicin/Adriamycin
Note: Drugs often have both generic and trade names. (The trade, or proprietary, name could be considered a proper noun, but for the purposes of this review, it is categorized with the generic name.) Only the trade names are capitalized.
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