"If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once. By all means congratulate yourself that you are not a pedant or even a stickler; that you are happily equipped to live in a world of plummeting punctuation standards; but just don't bother to go any further." - Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots and Leaves.
I found this cartoon on Facebook earlier this week, and it gave me a good laugh.
I think people are either born with the curse of High Apostrophe Intelligence, or they're not; and if you were born into my family, there's a good chance you have High Apostrophe Intelligence.
I was correcting my teachers' punctuation by the time I was about eight {yes, I knew how to make myself popular}.
The only time I've experienced road rage was when I was stuck behind a poorly-punctuated truck on SH2 between Hastings and Dannevirke. For about 100km I gripped the wheel and looked for a place to pass so I didn't have to keep read the four lines of writing on the back of the truck. The first three lines were separated by commas; the last line had no punctuation at all.
WHY?! Why would you bother putting in commas on three lines and not put a full-stop at the end of the fourth?!
If you think punctuation doesn't matter in this day and age, I recommend you read Eats, Shoots and Leaves - it's funny and it's informative. Or try reading a piece of writing which has the punctuation taken out, or is poorly punctuated. Poor punctuation can slow a reader down; and no punctuation at all makes writing almost unintelligible.
Those of us with High Apostrophe Intelligence know ;-)
Anne-Marie x
I think people are either born with the curse of High Apostrophe Intelligence, or they're not; and if you were born into my family, there's a good chance you have High Apostrophe Intelligence.
I was correcting my teachers' punctuation by the time I was about eight {yes, I knew how to make myself popular}.
The only time I've experienced road rage was when I was stuck behind a poorly-punctuated truck on SH2 between Hastings and Dannevirke. For about 100km I gripped the wheel and looked for a place to pass so I didn't have to keep read the four lines of writing on the back of the truck. The first three lines were separated by commas; the last line had no punctuation at all.
WHY?! Why would you bother putting in commas on three lines and not put a full-stop at the end of the fourth?!
If you think punctuation doesn't matter in this day and age, I recommend you read Eats, Shoots and Leaves - it's funny and it's informative. Or try reading a piece of writing which has the punctuation taken out, or is poorly punctuated. Poor punctuation can slow a reader down; and no punctuation at all makes writing almost unintelligible.
Those of us with High Apostrophe Intelligence know ;-)
Anne-Marie x
I'm with you, sister! Part of my work involves teaching punctuation skills to undergraduates and in all these years I have come up with two theories regarding apostrophes: 1. If you're not taught it by a certain age, you'll never get it or 2. There is an apostrophe gene. With my struggling students, I can spend 40 minutes going over the rules, doing exercises with them, and then I write up on the board "The horses ran across the fields" and say "where does the apostrophe go in this sentence?" and half of them chorus "after the s in horses." Whereupon I despair of my skills as a teacher!
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