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?

Verbs

We use lots of words every day and lots of those words are verbs.  A verb is a type of word that tells us about something that happens.

The dog ate my homework.

I've highlighted the verb in this sentence.  The word "ate" tells us what happened.  The other words around it tell us who did it (the dog) and what they did it to (my homework).  Every sentence in English has at least one verb, because the purpose for writing or saying a sentence is to tell us about something.

Run!

 

Here we only have one word in the whole sentence, but that one word is still a verb.  It tells us about an action - running.

 

Verbs also give us an idea of "when".  The word "ate" tells us that the homework has already been eaten - it happened in the past.  "Run" is an instruction (also known as an "imperative verb", which we'll cover in a later lesson) and therefore is going to happen in the future.

 

The dog is eating my homework.
 





Here the action is happening right now.  It's still the dog eating the homework, but it hasn't already happened - there's a chance that we could get the homework back from the dog.

 

The dog will eat my homework.

 

The action in this sentence hasn't happened yet - it's a prediction for the future.