Friday, July 27, 2007

Apostrophe S

Why is it that I have so much trouble with apostrophes? I continually screw them up, in both directions. That is, I'll write a sentence that has both a plural and a possessive or contraction, and give an apostrophe in the former, but not the latter. E.g., "[T]o reiterate, the FRC has expressed no problem with teacher's [sic] leading their students in prayer--so long as its [sic] to Jesus." So it's not that I over- or under-use apostrophes, I just use them in the exact wrong cases. The same thing happens with "their" versus "there"--I flip them around constantly.

It just makes me feel like an idiot sometimes.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2110978.ece

PG said...

Technically, it should be "the FRC has expressed no problem with teachers' leading their students in prayer..."

"Leading" here is a gerund, not a present participle, so it is both the object of the prepositional phrase that began "with," and the noun possessed by the "teachers." Because "teachers" has a noun that it possesses, it should have an apostrophe after the "s."

Yes, I was raised to diagram sentences.