The proper use of articles for various types of nouns

MANY fluent speakers or writers of English, whether it’s their first or second language, get by quite nicely without explicitly learning its grammar rules and usage conventions. They therefore often get stumped when asked to explain even the most basic mechanisms that make the language work properly.

I was reminded of this state of affairs when an English teacher in Iran, Farhad H., recently sent me this e-mail: “Please look at the following sentence that I read in Reader’s Digest: ‘I know that it is possible to lose part of your humanity in order to survive. But I also know that the spark of human dignity is never completely extinguished.’