ShmoopTube

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[Coop and Dino singing]

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The day grandma learned to text…

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Ah, what a day it was. [Person checking phone and reads text from Grandma]

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She sent you 12 emojis of turkeys, your own last name, a message that said, "text text

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how does this work" and then…

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The dreaded all caps message. [Grandma text message in all caps]

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Yup.

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Somehow, grandma dearest managed to get stuck in all caps land.

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Which made this poorly punctuated message even more terrifying.

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Let this be a lesson: always use commas. [Arrow points to commas in Grandmas text message]

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Anyway.

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Capital letters aren't just for terrifying virtual yelling...

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They serve a variety of more normal and everyday functions – particularly when it comes to [Coop teaching about capitalization]

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proper nouns.

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And in order to really understand the use of capital letters, we better know what proper

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nouns are.

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Luckily for us, it's pretty easy!

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Easier than getting granny to text, at least…

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Proper nouns are people, places, and things that are very specifically named. [Dino talking about proper nouns]

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In other words, pretty much anything that's properly named is a proper noun.

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This includes....

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Books.

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Documents.

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Names of places.

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Or groups of people, schools, or even countries. [Pin board with maps and photos of holiday locations]

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It even includes days of the week!

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A few examples include, Huckleberry Finn, the Rainforest, ABBA, U.C.

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Berkeley, South Korea, and Tuesday.

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They all have very specific names, so they all need to start with a capital letter.

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If something is just a generic noun, like “bunny” then we wouldn't capitalize it, [Bunny hops across a field]

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because that's not a proper and specific name.

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But the word “bunny” in Bugs Bunny certainly is capitalized, because that's his proper name. [Bugs Bunny appears behind a bush]

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Seriously, check his drivers license!

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Also, who gave that bunny a drivers license…? [A smashed car and a police vehicle as Bugs Bunny appears behind the car]

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That can't be safe…

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We also capitalize people's official titles when they appear before their name.

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If Bugs was a doctor, for instance, then we'd capitalize that, too, like so….

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Doctor Bugs Bunny.

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But if our sentence was simply, “Bugs Bunny is a doctor.”

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then we wouldn't capitalize it, since it's just the generic word and not part of his name. [Girl sitting in a room and Doctor Bugs Bunny appears]

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Got it?

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Good.

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Whether it's the title of a book, movie, person, place, school, country – or anything else,

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if it's a proper title specific to that very specific thing, it gets capitalized. [Dino giving examples of capitalization]

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But just remember – when we say capitalized, we only mean the first letter of each word.

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Don't capitalize the whole thing…

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Unless you want to yell back at granny, "PLEASE, OH PLEASE DON'T EAT ME!!! [Person sends text message to Grandma]

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I'LL DO THE DISHES FOR A YEAR!!!"

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Though that might just confuse your poor granny who just wants to share a nice turkey dinner

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with you… [Girl and Granny sitting at the table for dinner]

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