I’ll be the first to admit that my writing skills are not of the highest quality. I’ve been told that my sentences are too long and if I start to write the way I speak, which invloves a lot of tangent taking, it’s difficult to read. It often takes a lot of brain power for me to figure out what adjectives and verbs are. They didn’t teach that stuff when I was at school. Seriously there was about eight years in Australia when they just didn’t teach those word things. They did teach apostrophes though.
The magical things that apostrophes can do include:
- Replacing missing letters, e.g. do not becomes don’t.
- Denoting a possessive, e.g. God’s earth.
- If you’re really tricky it can show possession to a plural, e.g. families’ housing.
Things can get a touch confusing since every rule in the English language has a exception.
- The only time one uses an apostrophe with “it” is when you denote a missing letter, e.g. it is becomes it’s.
- “It” does not have a possessive apostrophe. If “it” owns a bag then it is “its bag”.
- The its/it’s thing is the same as plurals like ours, theirs, hers, his. They don’t have apostrophes.
Now that that’s out of the way I think the easiest way to remember it is to just remember that it’s = it is. I wish there was a fun little mnemonic or song to remember these things though. I heard one in one of Strong Bad’s emails on HomeStarRunner.com. I don’t remember it though.
I think that misapostrophication should be a word. It’s such a common thing that their should be one word to describe it.
There’s an Apostrophe Protection Society that is mildly amusing, feel free to check them out.
Yikes! misapostrophication “scares me” :crazy:
Ah, ’tis a common problem in this grammatically illilerate society of ours.
Technically, it’s is the contraction of it is, not the “missing letters,” but I’m really just being pedantic. Which I think is helpful sometimes.
The worst misapostrophication occurs when people feel that if you’re adding an ‘s’ to the end of any word, it needs an apostrophe. So we get these ridiculous signs in public saying “Hard hat’s must be worn on head’s” and so on. It not only looks wrong, it’s also more complex to write “hat’s” instead of “hats.” Crazy. That mistake flows, I believe, from the misguided idea that to indicate more than one CD you write “CD’s” or many ATMs you write “ATM’s,” etc. The fact that this is never taught in schools makes it even more bizarre that people think it is a correct use of apostrophes.
And’s thats mys’ twose cent’s,
.e’s.
Foo – It’s not that scary really. If only spell checkers checked grammar as well!
Ed – yeh, I just don’t have the word “retraction” in my easy access vocabulary, or any other similar description, I therefore don’t mind you being pedantic in this instance 🙂