(Alternate title: The Spam I Receive Has Better Grammar Than My Corporate Workplace)
This really frustrates me. How many times do I visit an otherwise professional website, only to find that whoever wrote the copy for it had no concept of when to use (and not to use) apostrophes? Specifically, the ‘apostrophe ‘s” combination. People in general know that contractions use apostrophes– I rarely see something like ‘doesnt’ or ‘cant’– but they seem to have no understanding of when apostrophes are used in conjunction with the letter ‘s’ at the end of the word. In my opinion, there’s really nothing as unprofessional as this. The worst part? It’s getting worse, not better! It’s becoming more and more widespread. Are people just not being taught grammar in school anymore?
Here’s a real example, pulled from my employer’s corporate intranet:
Misused Apostrophe
Do you see the mistake? There should not be an apostrophe in ‘participants’. By comparison, the spam I received in my email inbox this morning not only had perfect grammar (in an attempt to bypass my spam filters, no doubt), it also correctly used words like ‘inconceivably’. Why can random spammers write better English than professional writers?
So for those of you who didn’t catch the mistake above, here is the condensed version of when to use ‘apostrophe ‘s”:
1) DO use it to indicate possession– i.e: Jim’s car, the participant’s boredom, the Jones’ house (be careful of this last one– since the name already contains an ‘s’, the apostrophe is placed after it, not before).
* The exceptions to this are the generic singular nouns (he, she, it); when forming the possessive with these, there is no apostrophe (his bike, her closet, its colour (a wall, for example)).
2) DO use it to indicate a contraction with the generic singular nouns discussed above– i.e: it’s (it is) warm outside, he’s (he is) a nice person, she’s (she is) out of town. In slang, you can also use other nouns like this to form contractions, but this is rather confusing in written English (i.e: my mom’s (mom is) out shopping), and is more widely used when speaking.
3) DO NOT use it just because a word is plural. ‘Participants’, above, is plural, but in the context of the sentence, there is nothing that indicates a possessive, and a contraction would not make sense (‘on providing participant is with greater self awareness’…?), so an apostrophe should not be used.
4) DO NOT use it because you’re just unsure. There are plenty of online and offline resources available to you to give you the rules of grammar– there’s (there is) no excuse not to look it up ESPECIALLY if you work for a large company.
So there’s my rant for the day. Miss Grammar Freak, at your service.
