So I Cant Correct Them Without Embarrassing Both Of Us - Tumblr Posts

PSA FOR THE COMMUNITY

Apostrophes are used to form possessives of nouns, to indicate the omission of letters, and occasionally to form plurals of lowercase letters. Does this make sense to you? Let’s go into more detail:

POSSESSIVES:

“the man’s hat” is the hat of the man.

“James’ hat” is the hat of James. Note that “James” ends in “s”, so the additional s can be excluded or included.

For joint posession, such as “Kylie and Jacob’s game”, only the final noun has an apostrophe.

OMISSIONS:

Commonly known as contractions, this category is one of the most frequently misused. Let’s (let us) look at some examples.

“don’t” do not

“who’s” who is (although, depending on context, you may want to use “whose” instead)

“could’ve” could have - this is frequently misheard “could of”, which is gramatically incorrect

Decades of the 1900s are also commonly shortened “the ‘60s”, “the ‘80s”, and so on.

And most importantly,

“it’s” means “it is”, AND IS NOT THE SAME AS “ITS”. “Its” is a possessive pronoun meaning “belonging to it”, as in “The Council has made its decision.”

Possessive pronouns such as “theirs” and “its” do not need apostrophes to show that they are possessive. If you’re using indefinite pronouns such as “anyone” or “nobody”, then apostrophes ARE used to indicate possession, as in “It’s everybody’s dream.”

Let’s try some examples:

“___ a wonderful life” - it’s

“(examining a computer) ___ hard drive is dead.” - its

“___ no biggie.” - it’s

“This meeting will attempt to address some prior concerns of ___ members.” - its

Does this make sense? I know, English sucks.

One other thing:

APOSTROPHES SHOULD NEVER BE USED FOR PLURALIZATION OF ANYTHING THAT ISN’T A SINGLE LETTER.

If you want to refer to, say, how many instances of the letter “s” occur in a text, you might want to say something like “There are 67 s’s in the text.” This indicates the single letter’s separation from the plural. Compare it to its counterpart, without the apostrophe - “67 ss in the text” is harder to read.

Apostrophes should not be used in pluralization of anything else. If you say “I spent hours’ waiting in the rain”, then you are not only a wet fool, but gramatically incorrect. “Hours” is already a full, pluralized word - you don’t need to add anything.

Please, please share this information. Check your work. DON’T count on your teachers to find and correct these mistakes - even English teachers get this wrong. Please do your part to make the world a better place.

Sincerely, a grammar nerd who gets a migrane every time she sees “it’s” in place of “its”