Articles with Plural Nouns: Using The or Using Nothing at All

Last time we went over how and when to use articles with singular nouns. This time we are going to address the second half of the equation: plural nouns.

I find that using articles with plural nouns is much easier than with singular nouns. In fact, when I am correcting essays or document translations, I usually encourage the author to default to plural nouns if they are unsure of which article to use, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the meaning of the text. The reason? There is only one choice: to use the or not. You never use a or an with a plural noun.

Let’s look at the reference chart for plural nouns.

Plural Nouns	Countable
Unfamiliar	(no article)
Familiar	the

There might be a glaring difference if you remember the reference chart for singular nouns: there is no column for non-countable nouns.

Remember, countable nouns are nouns that you can physically count at any point in time (e.g. pencils, cats, cars, etc.) whereas non-countable nouns are nouns that you can never count without using a unit (e.g. water, air, French, equipment, staff, etc). Non-countable nouns are always singular, which is why we will not deal with them in this section. If you ever catch yourself vacillating on whether a noun is countable or not, there are many good resources online with extensive lists of common non-countable nouns. Please don’t let your readers catch you using them incorrectly; It’s one of the most obvious errors to native speakers.

The versus No Article

So, unlike with singular nouns, we only need to ask one question to decide whether to use an article or not: are you familiar with the noun or are you speaking in general terms? If you are familiar with them, use the. If you are speaking in general terms, use nothing at all.

Let’s look at some examples.

The dogs were barking loudly at night.

In this sentence, the use of the in front of dogs implies that both the speaker and the reader/listener are aware of which dogs are being referred to. This could be because the dogs were mentioned earlier in the conversation or because there is a shared relationship between all the people present and the dogs.

Dogs bark loudly at night.

The lack of article before Dogs implies that the speaker is speaking of all dogs, no matter what type or from where. It might sound strange because the statement may not be 100% factual, but it is grammatically correct. Grammar doesn’t care about opinion or facts.

An extra tidbit that might pop up is the use of the to emphasize a choice. Take the following question: “Who are more important to a movie, the actors or producers?”

You can easily answer this question by just repeating one of the choices. “Oh, actors.” or “I think producers are much more important.” You are speaking in general terms, so not using an article is grammatically correct. Although this is a completely valid answer, you might find that many people naturally add a the to the answer, resulting in, “Oh, the actors.” or “I think the producers are much more important.” In this case, the use of the places emphasis on the group of choice. You might even find people changing between using the and no article for the rest of the conversation. That is the beauty of articles with plural nouns. They are much more forgiving.

Source (and good resource):http://www.butte.edu/departments/cas/tipsheets/grammar/articles.html#:~:text=Articles%20are%20used%20before%20nouns,its%20identity%20is%20not%20known.