The apostrophe serves a couple very specific purposes. If you look around at most marketing materials, you’d assume its purpose is simply to separate the letter ‘s’ from the rest of a word. That’s, well, not even in the ballpark.

Apostrophes where they don’t belong (for instance, in the first word of this sentence) break the reading flow and, like misspelled words, announce either ignorance or laziness.

When two words are combined and letters are left out in the process, an apostrophe signals the event. When we mean “is not” but write “isn’t” we’ve left out the letter ‘o’ and announced the fact with an apostrophe. In writing, we don’t gain much with that one ’cause it’s one symbol for one letter. It reads more naturally, though, because most of us say “isn’t” rather than “is not”.

Casual writing doesn’t mean sloppy writing, though. Sure, I said “’cause” up above. Many of us drop the ‘be’ off ‘because’ and pronounce it that way. I don’t advocate trying to mimic dialects or accents in writing unless you’re an expert. But feel free to write more like we speak, and less like most business folks write.

Where was I? Ah; yes. When to use an apostrophe. Letters left out in a contraction. The other use (there are, indeed, only two you’ll encounter outside grammar books) is to signal possession; one thing is owned by (or included in) another.

The cat’s whiskers serve a particular purpose. Sue’s business is thriving. The paper’s surface is white.

The whiskers belong to the cat; they’re part of it. The business belongs to Sue. The surface is part of the paper.

If you have two televisions, and abbreviate the fact, they are plural, TVs. There is no apostrophe. If you want to refer to the TV’s screen or size or whatever, fine. But if your sign says “We fix TV’s” you’re just plain wrong. VCRs are plural, not possessive. Some folks seem to think it looks funny that way. I assure you, it looks less funny than doing it wrong.

Two oddities:

There’s one place which seems to go either way: referring to decades by their numbers. While I would refer to the black hole decade of no decent music as “the 70s” other writers whom I respect greatly write “the 70′s”, implying, I believe, the years belonging to that decade. You’ll note, though, that it’s always spelled out as “the seventies” and not as the possessive “seventy’s” so I’m sticking with my method.

The other oddity? Well, it’s a simple little word, but its use requires plain old memorisation, because it’s not based on rules, but convention. Yes, “it’s” and “its”.

The apostrophe only appears in the contraction. If you mean “it is” you write “it’s” but if you mean “belonging to it” you write “its” as in, “its hinges are rusty so it’s hard to open”. Memorise the rule for that one. It’s the only way to get its usage to become automatic.

Dave’s guitar playing is perfect for my music. Dave’s playing with my band again. There used to be two Daves in my band.

Stop abusing apostrophes.

Tomorrow: Episode 3—Don’t Be Your Own Editor