How to Avoid Some Common Punctuation Mistakes: The Misunderstood Apostrophe

Consider the apostrophe. It is perhaps the most overworked yet underappreciated of all the punctuation marks. Nothing could be more straightforward; however, aside from the comma, no mark is more misunderstood.

The apostrophe performs two major functions which make our lives more pleasant: it denotes possession and fills in for the letters left out of a contraction. And how do we thank it? With greed. We try to force the apostrophe to make words plural.

We take one sub, or hoagie, or hero, or whatever you call a big ol' sandwich in your part of the country, but we're not satisfied with just one big ol' sandwich and we say, "give me two sub's, or hoagie's, or hero's." Wrong-o. If you have one sub, but you're still hungry, all you have to do is add the letter "s" to the end of the word "sub" and abracadabra. It's plural. The apostrophe should be off taking a smoke break while you're ordering multiple sandwiches. Watch, I'll demonstrate again. Do you think I write boring article's? I don't. I write boring articles. Hey, wait a minute.

See, if I go to the store to buy some "sub's" what I am saying is that something belongs to the sub. If I say, "this sub's taste is great," aside from the fact that this is a somewhat awkward way to say the sub tastes great, I am correctly showing that the taste belongs to the sub. Similarly, I could say that this article's fourth paragraph is going on too long and I would be correct on both counts. The paragraph belongs to the article and it is droning on a bit.

Now hold on to your hat, because things are about to get hairy. What if someone whose name ends in an "s" wants to buy a car and we need the apostrophe to prove it belongs to him or her. What if Elvis wanted a Cadillac? Would it be Elvis' Cadillac, or would it be Elvis's Cadillac? It would be Elvis' Cadillac. The confusion is due to the fact that when the sentence is read aloud, it sounds like you are saying "Elvis's."

Now check your calendars, because it's opposite day. When you write the possessive case of a personal pronoun, you don't use an apostrophe at all. If you ask, "whose sub is this?" the answer is that "it is hers." Where is the remote control? It is in its drawer under the coffee table. Why am I typing out "it is" all of a sudden? Because I don't want to confuse myself or my reader. Oh wait, yes I do; it's fun. So where is that remote? It's in its drawer. What is this article doing? It's challenging its author.

The annoying part of slogging through articles that have this plural/possessive mistake over and over is knowing that a child understands these rules better than most of us. Cecelia, a sixth grade teacher, told her class on Thursday that the answer to the bonus question on Friday's English test would be found on the sign at the bait shop across from the school. So when she asked her 11 and 12 year olds on Friday what the grammatical error on the bait shop's sign was, all 30 of them got it right. The owner of the bait shop believed himself to be selling "live crab's."

Now, everyone knows how to use the apostrophe in words like "don't" and "isn't." In this case it keeps us from having to type out the entire word. But I think the confusion between possession and plural may come from a special type of contraction: the one that allows us to leave out the word "is." When we type out the title of that Diane Keaton movie from a couple of years ago in which Jack Nicholson sees her nekkid and freaks out, we type out "Something's Gotta Give." People see words like "something's," "that's" and "she's" and it influences them to start preceding every "s" that ends a word with a blessed apostrophe. They are drunk on apostrophes.

And if you like feeling confused, because admit it, it's kind of liberating, remember that the word "apostrophe" has another meaning: it is the word used to describe the poetic device in which a dead person or inanimate object is directly addressed. The internet cliché in which you denote that you are referring to, for example, mullets, and you type, "mullets, I'm looking at you," is also an apostrophe. But this is just a fun aside for you word lovers.

So, to sum up the rule here, if you are making a word plural, you don't use an apostrophe. If you are making two words into one contraction or saying that a thing belongs to someone (or something), you do use an apostrophe, unless you are making a personal pronoun possessive. Got it? Now let's go out there and do this right. A writer's pride demands that writers' punctuation marks' placements aren't what's holding us back.