Wednesday, September 01, 2004

apostrophic rant - forgive me.

Why why why why why why why do people (translation: students taking classes from me) think that apostrophes make nouns plural? One Federalist, two (or more) Federalists: this is not complicated. The correct term is not "Federalist's" as that indicates ownership, not "Federalist" because that suggest that only one person was doing all of the things you're writing about, but Federalists...

Words Written: zero
Lessons Graded: a lot (maybe forty?)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's very naughty of your student's to plague you with all of those apostrophe's lol
Steven's ;)

TeacherRefPoet said...

Remember Dave Barry's rule: The purpose of an apostrophe is to warn the reader that an "s" is coming.

I've got HS sophomores this year. I will teach them apostrophes. FIRST. Here's hoping (for both of us) that you teach them someday, and they're not making apostrophe errors.

Koochie Taster said...

If Dave Barry 'say's it, it mu'st be right. "'S" get's an awful lot of ink time anyway, I think it's about time for the apo'strophe's to get their share too.

Swankette said...

I must 'fess that I have been trying to misuse apostrophes a lot as of late. I've decided that it's because there must always be one punctuation mark in my life that I overuse. It used to be the comma, but for some reason I've outgrown that and now it's the apostrophe... which looks a lot like a comma floating in the air.

Then again, I proofread my work and (at least most of the time) correct the mistake.