Practice replacing the apostrophe with the missing letter or letters. This will make you an expert at missing letters and help with apostrophe use as well. By the way, try not to use contractions when writing serious assignments. They are fine in creative writing but do not use them when doing official types of writing.
Don’t ask Edith’s opinion on her parents’ will. My goodness apostrophes everywhere! What is an apostrophe? When is an apostrophe necessary? To apostrophe or not to apostrophe that is the question! The apostrophe is a punctuation mark. It looks like this ‘. It has two main jobs in grammar that you can understand. Hang out with me for a few minutes. The first job it does is that it shows up when we drop a letter.
There are many common examples of this:
What’s for dinner?
It’s raining out!
I could’ve done that. (“have”, not, “of”)
The second use of the apostrophe is the one that seems to cause us some grief. The rule is simple but the exceptions ask you to be careful. The rule is: use the apostrophe to show possession. Check this sentence. The cook’s pots are on the stove. Whose pots are they? The cook’s of course, so they are his possessions. Now do you know what we mean by possession? So the first part of the rule is add ‘s to show possession. By the way how many cooks do we have? One only, ah, how do we show the reader that we have more than one cook? Easy add the s to cook and we have cooks and now add the apostrophe. The cooks’ pots are on the stove.
Now you have the general rule:
add apostrophe s for singular possession
add s apostrophe for plural possession.
Now for the grief! Exceptions and watch fors!
a) Some words are plural to start with:
Ex. Children, moose, men – add apostrophe s
b) Compound words – my mother-in-law’s home
c) Words that are singular but end in s – use what sounds best.
This one is tricky, if in doubt, add apostrophe s :
James’s car, the princess’s dress
d) Some say, add apostrophe s, to form the plural of letters and figures. This one is hotly contested. That means, not everybody agrees on the rule. Not all agree that an apostrophe should be used to denote plural. So check with your teacher on this one.
Cross your t’s and dot your i’s. Some say; Cross your ts and dot your is.
Your 4’s are odd looking. Some say; Your 4s are odd looking.
You’re on your way to being the teacher’s expert on the apostrophe’s rules.
