NOUNS 2

Common Nouns and Proper Nouns

A common noun is a general name.

It is common to all the people, all the things, all the places, etc... that are of the same type.

e.g.

• Girls (there are many girls and they are all referred to as girls)
• Cat (there are many cats in the world, and each one is a cat)
• Library (each of the different places in the world where different books are kept so that people can read and borrow them is known as a library)

A particular noun is a particular name.

e.g.

• Mount Fuji (there is only one place in the world that has this name)
• The Longman Dictionary of Grammar and Usage (this is the name of one particular publication)
• Charles Dickens (there is only one English author called Charles Dickens. No one has this particular name)

Here are the details:
Common Noun:  man, author  >  Proper Noun:  Charles Dickens, George Orwell
Common Noun:  country, nation  >  Proper Noun:  Singapore, Indonesia
Common Noun:  city, place  >  Proper Noun:  Bali, Jakarta
Common Noun:  book, novel  >  Proper Noun:  "A Tale of Two Cities", "War and Peace"
Common Noun:  queen, person  >  Proper Noun:   Queen Elizabeth II

A proper noun begin with a capital letter. Words like of and and (prepositions and conjunctions) are normally not written with their first letter capitalized. The first letter of a preposition or conjunction is capitalized if the word is the first word of the title of a publication.

Source: 
The Longman Dictionary of Grammar and Usage