Many writers these days seem to have lost the touch for properly placed apostrophes when writing in English. Is this apostrophe's demise? Or should I rather say apostrophes demise? It shouldn't be. The apostrophe helps you make your text fluent to read and easy to understand. It also prevents all kinds of misunderstandings. The apostrophe, in short, is a writer's honing tool when fine-tuning textual meaning.
Normally, when feeling unsure about the use of a turn of phrase, you would go and look it up in Shakespeare. But the apostrophe is a migrant but newly arrived. It is a fledgling of a mere 150 years' use. Is it a wonder that 50 per cent of teachers don't use it correctly?
As a reader, I find it most annoying to have to puzzle out a paragraph's meaning. That could be because there are no apostrophes. Or in a worse scenario, apostrophes have been applied randomly and therefore often wrongly. As a writer, I try to use them as correctly as possible. Nobody is perfect, though, in this grammatical minefield.
If you stick to basics, it's actually quite simple once you memorized the rules. The word apostrophe is Greek in origin and translates to elision, i.e. leaving out something or turning something away. That defines the main point of the apostrophe: To take the place of a letter being left out.
If we write: I don't use apostrophes; then we have shortened do not to don't; the apostrophe takes the place of the lost o. That is easy enough to follow. So when setting an apostrophe, always reason out with yourself which letter you left out, and you shouldn't get too many wrong anymore. It certainly will prevent you from using it wrongly in plural situations. Commonly called grocers' apostrophe, the apostrophe applied to a plural makes bananas go banana's.
Trouble starts when using the apostrophe to denominate possession followed by an s. Everybody feels comfortable to state: It's the boy's bike; when referring to the bike belonging to the boy. It's like short-circuiting a fuse in readers' brains when boy's suddenly should be used as a plural. These boy's are still boys, and I don’t see a letter being left out either, or do you?
What happens if we have several boys or bikes? These are the boys’ bikes; this quite clearly states that several bikes belong to several boys. Whereas: These are the boy’s bikes; means that several bikes belong to one boy. Do you see how confusing the grocers' apostrophe would be under these circumstances? A plural often (but not always) ends in an s. It doesn't take a second apostrophe to replace the lost s at the end of the word, one is quite enough.
The s at the end of plurals brings me to another point: Names ending in s. Now if the boy’s name is James, it becomes: It's James' bike. The apostrophe is there to denominate possession. There are people using James's. There are works on grammar stating that the latter is correct. For all I know, both are correct. Either way, it's not messing up the brain, both usages are in themselves logical.
To make all of this easy to use: Your first question when applying an apostrophe should be: Which letter did I leave out? If you didn't leave out a letter or in case you just can't answer the question, your second question should be: Does the object coming after the word containing the apostrophe belong to that person? If the question again is no, then there shouldn't be an apostrophe at all. Get rid of it.
Maybe this will help you to eliminate things like CD's or DVD's in plurals. I don't know what belongs to a CD or a DVD, but the plural would be CDs and DVDs. If you should feel confused enough already at this point, don't read the next paragraphs.
There are uses of the apostrophe outside these simple rules. Please read the following three examples and then decide which one is correctly using an apostrophe: a) Dos and don'ts; b) Do's and don'ts; c) Do's and don't's.
According to the rules I stated above, version a) is the correct one as these are plurals and don't need any apostrophes. But quite frankly, when I was presented with these three possibilities, I didn't understand a) at all until I had read b). But b) is wrong not only because it's not according to the rules by inserting the apostrophe in dos, it's also inconsistent by not inserting it into don't as well. As to c), while it looks plain silly there are certain language specialists who tend to declare c) the right choice by citing the phrase: Do you dot your i's? Rather than writing: Do you dot your is?
I can't really give a final answer to it. My mother taught me a), and I always struggled with the reading. Whereas b) somehow looks readable but not sensible. The spelling in c) looks a bit over the top to me, and the reference to i's to me sounds incorrect, as i is a single letter and not a word like do. I therefore would refute the language specialists' assessment as being not applicable much like comparing apples to pears. I personally stick to a). What was good enough for Nancy Mitford is certainly good enough for me.
But if you manage to just stick to the basics, that will help you a lot. I would hazard a guess that in 90 per cent of cases you're out of trouble. If on top of all this you can manage to keep there, their, and they're sorted at the same time, you'll manage pretty everything in writing. Just remember not to use apostrophes as you would use garnish on a dinner plate.
No comments:
Post a Comment