As a technical writer, I am of course concerned about grammar and punctuation. I like to think that I am not too fossilized to appreciate the fact language evolves, even if I do not always think it is for the better. For example, I believe that txt spk shd b 4 fones only, unless you are using it for effect. Similarly, I object to overuse of jargon and colloquial and slang language in situations where you are trying to address a broad audience, because they contain too many words that are peculiar to a specific group of people, and act to exclude rather than include other people. However, my absolute despair is reserved for the way that we use the humble apostrophe.
Many years ago, the late (and sorely missed) Keith Waterhouse founded the Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe (AAAA) to fight against the pernicious misuse of the apostrophe. More recently, Lynne Truss also attacked their aberrant use in her excellent book “Eats, shoots and leaves”. Despite their efforts, however, the misuse of apostrophe’s carry’s on regardless, as I just demonstrated. There has even been a radical idea put forward by an etymological academic that we should write the way we speak, which would lead to the complete abolition of the apostrophe. So, for example, ‘They’re over there with their children’ would read: ‘There over there with there children.’ Thanks for that example Keith. However, that would completely negate the principal purpose of writing, which is communication. We need words to be spelt differently, because of all the aural, oral and visual cues that we are missing compared to listening to someone face to face. We need the apostrophe in our armoury of grammar and punctuation; it just needs to be used properly.
It really is simple to place an apostrophe correctly, using just the following simple rules that I will leave you with:
- Use the apostrophe to indicate where one or more consecutive letters have been omitted from a word. For example, the classic forecastle becomes fo’c’s’le.
- Use the apostrophe to indicate the possessive. It is placed immediately after the thing doing the possessing. For example, “This is Andrew’s house” means “This is the house belonging to Andrew.” The exception to this is it’s. It’s means “it is”; its means “belonging to it”.
- Use the apostrophe to indicate the structure of an unusual word that might otherwise cause confusion. For example, “Cross your i’s and dot your t’s.”