I’ve just finished reviewing a professional document for a speaker friend in Dubai. A wandering apostrophe caught my eye. Rather than trying to explain the weird and wonderful rules of English grammar to a non-English-as-a-first-language person I looked for a quick online review of the issue.
Varsity.co.nz had me smiling with the following piece.
“Apostrophe’s are perhaps the most misused punctuation mark in the English language. Magazine article’s, university essay’s, grocery label’s and even advertising billboard’s have been known to commit the most vile atrocitie’s against sense through the misuse of this misunderstood yet deceptively simple punctuation mark. Here, for the benefit of […] student’s, is a brief guide on where to use, and not to use, apostrophe’s. If you’ve noticed my reckless misuse of apostrophes in the title and passage above, then well done. If not, then for God’s sake please read on. Basically, an apostrophe is a signal telling the reader that a word is either a possessive or a contraction.”
Check the rest of the article at www.varsity.co.nz/content/view/499/142/ – they then follow with a nicely simple explanation. And if you’d like a real belly laugh, pick up a copy of Lynn Truss’s ‘Eats shoots and leaves’. My youngest son Maurice gave it to me for Christmas one year – having been at the receiving end of numerous editorial coaching conversations during his uni years, he knew his mother would appreciate it!
You son would have got top marks for grammar! I think it’s a very ‘New Zealand thing’ to misplace apostrophes and it’s not as if we’ve lost them, we tend to overuse them.
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