When it comes to grammar, I’m no pedant but these days it seems anything goes. Yet without good grammar and correct punctuation misunderstandings would be rife. As a professional writer, howling errors jump off the page at me but by far my most common bugbear is misuse of the humble apostrophe.
We’ve all smiled at signs such as “Tomatoe’s” and “Crisp’s”. The problem seems to lie in people’s inability to recognise that there are only two possible uses for apostrophes: one being to show ownership of something – a possessive apostrophe – and the other being to denote a letter (or letters) left out of a word – the contraction or abbreviation apostrophe.
For instance:
“Some of Melanie Silver’s clients have used the copywriting services of Words etc for over 16 years.”
In this example, a possessive apostrophe should be used.
“Did you know Melanie Silver’s won numerous awards for her copywriting?”
Here, an abbreviation apostrophe is needed to represent a missing word – in this case ‘has’.
It’s true that things can get slightly more complicated with words and names that already end in an ‘s’ but for a singular word ending in ‘s’ we just add ‘s – as in “the boss’s complaint”. And for plurals ending in ‘s’ we add only an apostrophe after the ‘s’, as in this example:
“Our clients’ marketing communications present a professional image.”
Simple really!
