Apostrophes are surprisingly difficult to use. They shouldn’t be. The rules surrounding them are straightforward. But even if you can get a handle on the rules, which I’ll talk about in a moment, errors can be difficult to spot when they inevitably slip through the editorial net.
I had a document back from a very pleased editor today, which is a nice thing to happen. However, looking at the text, the first thing I noticed was that I had written “the doors over there” as the penultimate piece of dialogue. I didn’t spot the mistake, my readers didn’t spot it, and the editor didn’t spot it. Apostrophes are tricky beggars*.
You may be asking yourself what the mistake was. It’s impossible to tell without the context – but the context is that the character is trying to indicate the location of a particular door, ie. the door is over there, rather than pointing out a particularly interesting group of doors. So the sentence should be “the door’s over there” not the “doors over there.” This sort of error is easy to miss. Given the right context, the incorrect sentence would be correct. Mis-used apostrophes can easily appear in the guise of misplaced words or awkward ideas.
So what are the rules for apostrophes?
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Numbers are important.
I don’t remember much about the songs I wrote when I was a teenager and hoped that playing the guitar would help me talk to girls. But this morning I caught myself singing a couple of lines from one of them:
“The sky falls in but you’re exactly the same,
And 41 angels turn acceptance to blame.”
Why would these lines stick in my head?
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Is there a fundamental difference in the best ways to structure factual essays and fictional stories? Recently I’ve begun to wonder if they are closer than I thought.
I have a spiel I give to students. It goes like this: An essay, paper or presentation is not like a story or a novel. You are not spoiling it for me if you start by telling me how it ends. I do not want to be surprised by your conclusions. Instead, I want to know where you’re going right from the first paragraph.
We’ve all heard the saying “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them.” But what are you supposed to tell them? A lot of students lapse into vague generality; “I’m going to talk about such and such” or “I’m interested in this and that.” But the most important part of a paper isn’t the theme, it’s the idea – in the same way that the most important part of a story is not the genre but, well, the story! If you aren’t telling me the story, or your idea, then why am I reading your paper?
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Living in France has meant having to study French. Studying French has meant learning to use the subjunctive, a special type of conjugation that turns up when expressing doubt, sentiment, a personal judgement or a desire.
So “je comprends le subjonctif” is right (I hope), but “c’est important que je comprends le subjonctif” is wrong and should actually be “c’est important que je comprenne le subjonctif.”
With me so far? You’re doing better than I did, or most Anglophones do for that matter. The subjunctive is one of those things that we all struggle with, but which French people use all the time (unless they’re getting it wrong as well.) So far I reckon I have about a 50% success rate.
It is at this point in a class that the French teacher (and many Anglophone students) may nod sagely, and observe that the reason for the difficulty is that we English don’t use the subjunctive. Which is, as it happens, completely wrong: we use the subjunctive in English all the time. It just isn’t always clear that we’re doing it.
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Today was the first day of the @NaNoWriMo’s April Camp. In a blitz of positivity over the weekend, mostly inspired by the thought that Monday would be my last day of teaching, I signed up.
National November Writing Month is an internet based creative writing project. It’s free to take part and your nationality doesn’t matter. It challenges you to write 50,000 words of a novel in one month; you create a user profile, post your word count at the end of the day, and watch as the numbers tick on up towards your target.
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Apostrophes are surprisingly difficult to use. They shouldn’t be. The rules surrounding them are straightforward. But even if you can get a handle on the rules, which I’ll talk about in a moment, errors can be difficult to spot when they inevitably slip through the editorial net.
