Shaw & Todd - Advertising and Marketing Communications

I’ll admit, I have a Pavlovian-esque reaction to a misused apostrophe – head shaking, eye rolling and even the occasional exasperated sigh. Think I’m overreacting to this tiny punctuation mark? A quick peek into the blogosphere reveals a multitude of lengthy and even heated discussions on the topic. I even stumbled upon The Apostrophe Protection Society, which isn’t nearly as funny as I had hoped.

Now I’m hardly qualified (or apparently passionate enough) to swing a bat with these major leaguers, but I do make an effort to avoid the most common misuses of the apostrophe: it’s/its and you’re/your.

‘Its’ is a possessive pronoun, while ‘It’s’ is a contraction of ‘it is’.

‘Your’ is a possessive pronoun, while ‘You’re’ is a contraction of ‘you are’.

Clearly, its use is necessary; it’s just not to be abused. Or ignored for that matter. The poor, modest apostrophe; it’s just trying to help!

 Oh, apostrophe

Well-intended yet abused

It’s our fault, not yours

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Public Relations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.