Eric’s Blog

Yes, the subject was a joke, but frankly, so many people mess up the innocent apostrophe, it’s driving me NUTS. The apostrophe is talked about in grade school, and it has nothing to do with spelling, so why is it that this simple concept can’t be done correctly. In short? If you’re an adult, and you can’t use *basic* punctuation, you look really bad to those that can (and probably losing a large amount of credibility in the process). So, here’s the succinct lesson (non exclusive of course, but catches about 90% of the crap I see):

1) For GOD SAKES, quit putting a f-ing ’s at the end of a singular noun to make it plural! Take one thing, add another thing, you have two ‘things’, not two thing’s. This is a grammar felony, and should be avoided at all costs.

2) If a singular noun owns something, then put a apostrophe (with an ’s’) at the end. Example:

- The engine belongs to the car, so it’s the car’s engine.

3) If you want to know how to handle plural nouns owning something, there’s exceptions, so I’m not going to talk about it here (see the below link). #1 and #2 are the big ones.

4) For colloquial (informal) writing, you can get fancy, and use the apostrophe as a contraction (typically bad grammar fashion to do it in formal writing). You can be more creative, and it’ll add some flavor. Here are some examples:

“here is” becomes “here’s”
“it is” becomes “it’s”
“have not” becomes “haven’t”

And less common ones:

“here are” becomes “here’re”
“it will” becomes “it’ll”
“he would” becomes “he’d”

You get the idea, and for the love of crud, please show that we all can have better writing than a grade-schooler. As I’ve said to many people, nothing immortalizes poor writing skills like writing something in a letter or email where someone can re-read it at any time, and be reminded of it.

Here’s the link for some helpful reminders:

http://www.economist.com/research/styleGuide/

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 10:07 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.