Hello my bright rays of sunshine!

In this blog, we’ll review a lesson from my fourth grade English class. Just because we’ve grown up, doesn’t mean that we get to forget valuable information from our childhood. Today, we’re going to talk about apostrophes!

For those of you who aren’t sure what I’m talking about, an apostrophe is that little line when you either omit letters or refer to possession. For example: “The Fairy Godwriter’s blog is the best blog ever!”

So when do we use them?

Ok, even though I already told you in the paragraph above when you should use them, for the sake of clarity, I’ll expand on it a little bit more.

Contractions

Remember when we talked about contractions in the Your v. You’re blog? You use an apostrophe when you’re shortening a phrase (i.e. writing “It’s” instead of “It is”, or “should’ve” instead of “should have”).

Possession

When you’re pointing out that something belongs to someone, you use an apostrophe and an “s”: The Fairy Godwriter’s blog is funny, witty, nerdy, and helpful. (I love this example for obvious reasons: It speaks the truth, it displays an apostrophe, and it includes an Oxford comma).

When not to use it

Alright lovely readers. Please pay close attention to this one, because plenty of members of the literary intelligentsia have turned over in their graves when they see people make this mistake: Do not use an apostrophe to denote the plural version of something, unless you’re talking about numbers or the plural of a letter (I was born in the 80’s or I dotted all my i’s).

If you intend to say that you love Fridays, then simply write you love Fridays. Saying you love Friday’s or that all Mom’s are special, or that your friend’s are the best, causes goats all over Ireland to start bucking like they’ve been possessed by an invisible evil spirit, and screams of agony can be heard all the way from the bowels of hell right up to our planet. So don’t do that. Save the goats.

That is all for today.  Hope I didn’t scare you too much. If I did, go have a drink.

Much love,

The Fairy Godwriter