(no subject)

[mcroft]

Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, you idiots from Bob the Angry Flower is the only guide to the Apostrophe that anyone will ever need.

Comments

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

It's often the bellwether that the rest of the writing will have grammatical problems. As un unreconstructed apostrofascist, I find I have a more adversarial relationship with texts that fall down on this rule. I read them defensively, expecting at any time to have to stop my train of thought, repair the damaged trestle to the state the careless construction crew thought they left it in (based on my best guess), and attempt to get up a good head of steam for the rest of the trip. Like a ridiculously extended metaphor, sometimes it's not worth the bother.

On the other hand, I read Eats, shoots, and leaves about a week after I'd removed a rogue apostrophe from a bar's chalkboard advertisement about a block from my place in Jersey City, so I might be somewhat biased on the subject of The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation...

[avram]

Well, sure, most people who can write well have internalized some sort of consistent version of the apostrophe rules (there’s a lack of consensus about certain matters, like plurals of words that aren’t usually pluralized, or plurals of acronyms, or the possessive forms of famous names of antiquity). And most people who haven’t internalized these rules are bad writers on the compositional level. But not all. There are quite a few authors who routinely fall down on matters of spelling or punctuation; that’s why publishers hire copy editors.

What I’m saying is if we all just agreed to stop with the damn apostrophes already, and gave ourselves a few decades to get used to it, we’d all be better off. For those few decades I’d be twitching just as much as you would.