Greetings from the world of dangling modifiers, comma splices, sentence fragments, errors in pronoun-antecedent agreement, faulty parallelism, and misspelled words. Can you tell that I just finished grading my first set of essays for this fall semester? Along with these major issues (I call them the "horrible crimes"), there are also the misdemeanors, the smaller mistakes. Don't misunderstand. These are still important, and we all need to understand them. They just don't break down writing to quite the same extent the horrible crimes do. One such misdemeanor is the chronic misuse of the apostrophe.
So let's talk apostrophes, shall we? When do we need them? And when we need them, where do they go? The two times we use apostrophes are (1) in contractions and (2) in possessive nouns. I'm not going to waste your time (and mine) dealing with contractions. Most people get those right without any help from me. And in formal writing, we prefer to avoid contractions anyway.
So what about possession? It's fairly simple. We put an apostrophe in a noun when it owns or possesses the following word in the sentence. On which side of the "s" does the apostrophe belong? It depends on whether the noun is singular or plural. I'm going to copy/paste a section of a post from two years ago called, "Whose Bright Idea Was This?"
Typically, how do we know where to place the apostrophe in a noun to indicate possession? It depends on whether the noun is singular or plural, right? Yes, almost always. In singular possessive nouns, the apostrophe goes inside the 's,' and in plural possessive nouns, the apostrophe goes outside:
"The girl's bike" means ONE girl.
"The girls' bikes" means more than one girl.
Simple.
EXCEPT.
There are a handful of nouns that are irregular (and I mean ridiculously irregular) in the way they form their plurals, and they happen to be some of the commonest nouns in the English language: man, woman, child, person.
One man, but two.....men. One child, but two....children. One person, but two.....people.
And this is the stupidest one of all: One woman, but two....women? Whose bright idea was this? We change the pronunciation of the first syllable, but not the spelling. And then we change the spelling of the second syllable, but not the pronunciation. How utterly insane. Can you imagine being a foreign student and trying to figure this one out?
It would be so much easier just to say "two mans, two womans, two childs, and two persons." And if I were grammar queen, that's exactly how it would be.
As for possession, because these words (men, women, children, and people) are already plural without an 's', the apostrophe goes inside the 's' when they become possessive. Sorry! I know it's confusing. My students think so too.
So there you have it, the basic rules of apostrophes in possessive nouns. It really is easy, but even so, mistakes are everywhere!! One that bugs me the most is when people use an apostrophe in the word "parents." I see this all the time on Facebook, and it about makes me nuts, so let's clear it up once and for all, okay? Here is what I often see:
"I'm going to my parent's house for the weekend."
Ugh! What is wrong with this? You tell me. How many parents are we talking about in that sentence? Yeah, most likely two. If a person had only one parent, he or she would almost certainly say "my mom's house" or "my dad's house." We generally do not use "parent" in its singular form. Therefore, because there are two parents, the apostrophe belongs on the outside of the "s," like this:
"I'm going to my parents' house for the weekend."
Can we now say we've solved this problem forever? I really hope so. Similarly, I often see these signs on the outside of houses, announcing the last name of the family living inside. They look something like this:
The Smith's or The Anderson's or The Johnson's
Now a good argument could be made that these signs need no apostrophe at all (my preference) because they don't show any possession. So just leave the thing out. Others would argue that because the signs appear on houses, what is implied is "The Smith's House," and thus the apostrophe is needed. Okay, fine. I can live with that. What I can't live with is the apostrophe appearing on the inside of the "s," meaning only one person named Smith lives there, when it's actually a whole family. If you insist on the apostrophe, at least get it in the right place:
The Smiths' or The Andersons' or The Johnsons'
That's it. End of rant for tonight.
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