Apostrophes (for my lone commenter)
Lots of people have trouble with apostrophes, probably because hardly anyone gets adequately instructed in when not to use them.
Apostrophes are for possessives and contractions, and that's it. Um, pretty much. Like, this is Jessica's and Reuben's blog, it's awesome, isn't it? How many Jessicas or Reubens do you know who have their own blogs? Probably lots of Jessicas, actually, but surely not many Reubens! Point being, apostrophes are never to be used to make things plural unless---this being English, you should'be known there was an unless---you are pluralizing a number or an abbreviation such as M.A. However, if you leave the periods out of MA I believe it's acceptable to leave out the apostrophe, since MAs could be no other word. Or something like that. It gets a little hairy, and becomes a question of taste to some extent, when you start talking about pluralizing ATM or TV, so I generally just avoid it (yeah I'm lazy like that).
Exception: When something belongs to it, it's its. Heehee. This blog is awesome, its templates are really nice to work with. And obviously his and hers and ours and theirs.
A bit controversial are things like James's or James'---last I read, the convention is that in all non-Biblical cases (ie, when you're not talking about Moses) you should use the 's, and Moses gets to use the (nicer looking) lone apostrophe. I love Henry James's novels, but they are not as popular as Moses' tablets. Sorry, that's a terrible sentence. Oh oh, and when something is plural, you follow the Moses convention, i.e. The Simpsons' daughters may both look pretty good, but only one should be allowed to sing.
Hopefully this is reasonably coherent. The key is to think about what each word in the sentence is doing (god, I hate to admit it but those stupid sentence dagramming exercises in sixth grade really came in handy later). But really, as long as your meaning is clear, and you're not in a crowd that will dismiss you as a human being if you make little mistakes, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Let he who has never used an unnecessary comma cast the first stone, and all.
1 comment
Julianna
2/13/2005 at 9:11 AM (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Thank you Jessica. I will stop over- thinking it and just write.
I can say:
"This is Julianna's way of using apostrophes."
Now for commas. I am trying to find the website that had the little test that I failed so miserably about apostrophes and commas. I'll come back here when I find it so you can tell me what you think.
Thank you for your help!