Imagine you are looking at an American newspaper or news website. You read a few stories, and see terms such as health care, football game or bank policy.
These terms might all seem to have nothing in common, but they share a grammatical feature. This feature is often found in writing – especially in newswriting.

Today we will explore a pattern you will often find in the news business: nouns modifying, or describing, other nouns. Understanding this idea will not only help your reading skills, but also help develop your writing skills.
Join us as we explore a common pattern in news reporting!

Definitions
An adjective is a word that describes, or modifies, a noun or pronoun. Consider this example:

Everyday Grammar is a good program.

Here, the adjective good describes the noun program. A noun is a word that is the name of something. That thing could be a person, idea, place or action.
Sometimes nouns can act like adjectives. In other words, they change the meaning of other nouns. Listen to this example:

Everyday Grammar is a grammar program.

Here, the word grammar, a noun, is acting like an adjective. It is modifying the noun program. For the purposes of this report, we will call this pattern a 'noun-noun pairing.'

We have discussed this subject before in another Everyday Grammar program, which you can find on the VOA Learning English website. It is called When Nouns Act Like Adjectives.

News stories

You might be asking yourself: how does this discussion relate to news reporting?
Susan Conrad and Douglas Biber are grammar experts. They note that in newswriting, nouns that act like adjectives are almost as common as adjectives themselves.

In other words, understanding groupings of 'noun-noun' words is an important skill to have when reading news stories.

The good news for English learners is that there are patterns in how news writers use these pairings. Nouns that relate to abstract entities - things that you cannot really see - are often modified by other nouns. Examples include descriptions of organizations, businesses, or even human health.

Now, let me take you on a tour of a news website and offer a few examples.

Institutions

Our first stop is the newspaper's current events section. In this area, you often find stories about government institutions, cities, courts and so on.

Noun-noun pairings are often used to identify institutions, write Conrad and Biber.

Let's consider how nouns are used in that manner.

One example is the word government.

Here is a line from a story on the VOA Learning English website:

"Estonia has launched a project to make government administration completely digital."

Here, the noun government is acting like an adjective. It is modifying another noun, administration.