Apostrophes

Lots of people find difficulty with apostrophes, so if you're one of them then you're not alone.  Let's look at a couple of rules:

Apostrophes show where a letter or letters have been missed out.

Apostrophes show "possession".

These are the only circumstances when we use apostrophes.  Nothing else.  This is very important because people tend to use apostrophes in some other situations as well.

Omission

Omission is where something is missed out.  In the case of apostrophes, a letter or letters have been missed out.

Can't

This is really the word "cannot", but the "no" has been missed out.  Why?  No idea, but "cannot" sounds a bit too stuffy and old fashioned to me.  Omission often also includes the space between words (contraction), as well as some of the letters.

Where'd you go?

Here we've contracted the words "where did" into one word "where'd".  Because I missed out the space between the words and the "di" from "did", I've put an apostrophe in there to show it.

Possession

When we talk about possession in the case of apostrophes, what we mean is that one word belongs to another.

 

The cat's food.

Here the food belongs to the cat, so I've used an apostrophe to show it.

Potato's egg's veg

I saw this sign on the back of a van, but the apostrophe here is wrong.

The problem is, this doesn't fit with either of the rules that we introduced at the beginning.  The person who wrote this sign has used apostrophes to show plurals.  This is very important.  Apostrophes are never needed for a plural.  What the signwriter should have written is this:

With the word "potato" we add an "es" rather than just an "s" (we'll cover plurals in another lesson) but we still don't add an apostrophe.

Looking back through the lesson, can you identify why I've used apostrophes where I have?