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I think I am really bad at grammar, the reason is that I been applying for jobs and not getting interview and it got me thinking, maybe my english is problem, so today I started looking at my summary, then google nouns, which led me to proper and common noun,

Proficient in UI design and development for websites utilizing HTML, CSS and JavaScript, Created website for various sectors, including telecom, FinTech, and car loans companies. I enjoy self-learning and support culture of learning and teamwork. My main skill is converting design to responsive, interactive website, highly skilled in Version Control (Git) and I rephased it with

Proficient in UI design and development for websites utilizing HTML, CSS and JavaScript, created website for various sectors, including Telecom, FinTech, and Car Loans companies. I enjoy self-learning and support culture of learning and teamwork. My main skill is converting design to responsive, interactive website, highly skilled in Version Control (Git)

My question is, is what I capitalized right ones? how can I make sure if something is proper noun or not.

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    1) Be aware that "proofreading" questions, asking to find problems in a passage without a clear concern, are off topic. In my opinion this question is NOT a proofreading one and is okay, because you're focusing on proper vs common nouns, and your resume is just an example. But answers should talk about "how to make sure," not find all the mistakes. 2) Sure, it's good to fix as much of the usage in your resume as you can. But "applying for jobs and not getting interviews," even dozens or hundreds of times, is just a sad part of job-hunting, especially if it's a first job or in a new field. Commented Sep 5 at 23:13
  • No. Car and loan are not proper nouns by themselves. However, they could be proper nouns if they are part of an official company name, which is not the case in your example. So generally, it should be "car loan companies". This describes the type of companies, not their name. Note that "loan" should be singular here, because "car loan companies" is a compound noun, and so the plural S only needs to be added to the last word.
    – Billy Kerr
    Commented Sep 6 at 10:30
  • development of websites ... JS instead of JavaSript ... the first sentence should be two sentences ... the last sentence should also be two sentences
    – jsotola
    Commented Sep 7 at 4:56

2 Answers 2

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It can be hard sometimes to know whether a noun is proper or common; sometimes even the same word can have both types! (A "house" is a common noun, a place to live; but the "House" could be short for a section of the US (or UK as well?) government, and "House" by itself is a TV show.)

The general idea is simple: Proper nouns are when there's just one of this thing. Common nouns are for when we're talking about a type of thing; we might be talking about one of this kind of thing, but there are others of this type.

So the first step is to think about the thing that you're naming. Look it up if you need to. Is it something that there's just one of, or that there are many of? For instance, you never capitalized "website"; that's an easy common noun. Think about "car loans"; there are many car loans, and many car loan companies. And just because "telecomm" and "fintech" combine words doesn't make them proper nouns. This can be confirmed by looking them up in a dictionary.

Brand names and trademarks are proper nouns. There's just one Amazon company (and just one Amazon river!). Looking up the official website for Git, I find they capitalize it in phrases like "the advantages of Git." (Though it gets confusing since typing git commands on the computer usually uses lowercase, so the logo at the top of the page does as well. I confess I usually use lowercase when talking about it casually at work.) I'm not sure we can call Git a "brand" when it's open-source, but it is a trademark. "JavaScript" is also trademark (held by Oracle), but you've noticed it has its own "camel case" style of capitalization. When we're writing generally, we can decide how faithful we want to be to proper nouns that want unusual capitalization, like e e cummings or will.i.am, eBay, and IKEA, but if we ignore their preferences we should at least capitalize the first letter.

Now, this can get confusing because trademarks and brand names can also be used to refer to products made under that name, and there can be many copies of a product. The easiest example is car models. When I have a model of car by Honda called a Civic, I don't have the only one. But I still capitalize it, "I have a Civic." People could argue a long time over whether this is a proper or common noun; I would say both. There is a proper noun sense of "the Civic," when we're talking about the entire concept and phenomenon, as in "Honda promoted the Civic heavily." I would say that we capitalize because we're referencing that idea, and I would say that we're using "Civic" to stand for a much more common word, car. So we're using a proper noun to do the work of a common noun. There's something similar in "I bought a Monet"—there's just one Monet, the painter, but we really mean "I bought a painting by Monet." Similarly, I see arguments that demonyms (names for people from a place, like "Nevadans" from Nevada) are proper nouns. I'm unconvinced by this argument, and would argue similarly that they're adjectives derived from proper nouns doing the work of common nouns... But arguments aside, we capitalize them because of the proper noun they refer to.

Note that we also usually capitalize abbreviations. So UI, HTML, etc. are not proper nouns, but are rightly capitalized. (But note, the style tool "Sass" is often mistaken as "SASS," but it's not, it's a single word!)

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  • I don;t know if it is helpful to write this, but I have noticed that many UK native speakers and writers (perhaps of lesser education, or maybe dyslexic?) seem to be unsure about capitalisation of nouns and may play safe by capitalising all of them. Commented Sep 6 at 7:06
  • @MichaelHarvey I am not native, I admit I had bad schooling, I am just looking to relearn everything about english grammar etc, so I can teach my kids too. so any recommeded books is also welcome
    – localhost
    Commented Sep 7 at 12:06
  • Thanks Andy for such a descriptive answer, as mention my english is too weak, punctation, grammar etc and I struggle with it a lot (communication), as a developer we need to technical good but it depends on communication. what do you recommend? Also i thought Sass and SASS are the same.
    – localhost
    Commented Sep 7 at 12:08
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No need to complicate this. The short answer is no - 'car' is not a proper noun. It doesn't matter if you use it with an indefinite or definite article. A proper noun is a specific name for a unique person, place, or thing, and a car is not a unique thing. Even if it is "my car" or "the car" (which commonly refers to one's own car), it isn't unique any more than "my lunch" which will be different every day. The names of companies that produce cars are proper nouns (eg "Toyota" or "Ford"). If you were referring to a specific car by name (eg "Herbie" or "KITT"), that would be a proper noun. Likewise, 'loan' is a common noun. There are many loans. Further, when you say "car loan", this is a compound common noun. It is still a loan, but a type of loan, with 'car' acting as a modifier. There are many car loans.

In your quote from a CV/resume, the proper nouns are the unique names of products such as Java. But the names of generic processes, such as version control are common nouns because they are not unique - there are many different version control processes. Of course, there are proprietary version control systems and those may have proper nouns, such as Git, for example.

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