Apparently, what I said about commas and quotation marks was actually useful. So I thought I might as well tackle that other internet bugbear, the apostrophe. Apostrophes make zero sense, especially if you're coming to English from German, so here are some tips.

Possessives

Apostrophes can be used to show possession: like, Mary Jane's DVD collection or Darth Vader's Death Star. Here's how they work:

's if the word is singular, s' if it's plural

Simple. Of course, there are the dreaded exceptions. But they're simple, too. If the plural word doesn't have 's', then it's 's. Like 'children's books'. No problems here.

Contractions

Believe it or not, humans who spoke English were using contractions – words like 'I'm' – for hundreds of years before English teachers let them write 'em down. Phooey. Use contractions all you want. Just punctuate them right. This is important, because you can confuse people if you don't. Also, those grammar Nazis on the internet will razz you about them, like they know anything. Huh.

Anytime you put two words together, put an apostrophe instead of the bit you left out.

I am=I'm, you are=you're, he is=he's, would not=wouldn't, etc.

A no-brainer. Here are the tricky ones:

you are=you're, your=it belongs to you.

Spellcheck will not catch this one. Because it depends on what you mean. So stop and think: 'you are' or 'your', as in 'belongs to you'? Done and done.

The Dreaded It

No, we don't mean the Stephen King novel with the evil clown. We mean the its/it's problem. Once again, spellcheck is useless. Most people are helpless. Its/it's gets mixed up on signage all the time, and the trolls pounce, pounce, pounce. Here's how it worketh, and you can avoid all that agony:

it is=it's. (Apostrophe, because you left something out.)

Its=belongs to it. As in, 'That place down there is Panther Hollow. It's its name.

Why is there so much confusion over its/it's? Most of the grammar Nazis don't know this one. Until the 19th Century, the correct possessive pronoun for 'it' in English was 'his'. No lie. Remember 'every dog has his day'? Yeah. When whoever thinks these things up came up with 'its', it had to be spelled without an apostrophe, just like yours, ours, and theirs. But it's been messing with people's heads ever since. Notice the 'it's' in the previous sentence. It stands for 'it has'. And 'people's'. People=no 's'. People's, apostrophe s. Just messing with you.

Now you pretty much know all of it.

Fonts of Unwisdom

What we said before about quotation marks also goes for apostrophes. Web pages hate, hate, hate those horrible curly quotation marks and apostrophes the Word program likes to use. If you can find where Word hid the settings, turn off the so-called 'Smart Quotes' and the curly apostrophes. If you can't, don't worry. No matter what editors tell you, it will not kill them to use Find+Replace. They're just lazy.

Okay, that's me being useful again this week. I'll gladly take requests for anything else you want a cheat sheet for, but I refuse to discuss those semicolons again. SashaQ is fond of those semicolons, which I will gladly bequeath to Cleverbot. At some point, though, I'll make an effort, and try to explain hyphens. I thought the English had outlawed them, but then I realised it was just h2g2.

Anyway, as I said before, punctuation is a convention. It changes over time. Anybody who tells you they have a personal preference for this or that is telling the truth – they do, and as long as they don't have a bossy editor, or make too many readers scream, they're welcome to their quirks. But by the same token, don't let anybody tell you there's some absolute reason for this or that. That's nonsense. Orthography is not rocket science, or math, or physics. It's just something we've agreed on this week to make it easier to read all the drivel we write. Next week/year/century, it may change.

Don't believe me? Take a look at this 11th-century English sermon. Yeah, Wulfstan thought the end of the world was near – for about the same reason the TV preachers do today. That's not the interesting part, unless you like to chuckle at preachers. While the guy is translating, look at the punctuation on the manuscript. A long time ago, scholars puzzled over all those dots. What were they? Finally, somebody figured it out: they were marks to tell the sermoniser when to pause or breathe. Like, er, commas and full stops. What a concept.

Now you know something. Go make like an expert.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

02.10.17 Front Page

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