I need help with apostrophes, why are they so hard....

[Prairie~Phlox]

to figure out. I'm tying to teach my dd to write and she typed out this e-mail to our dear friends. I told her she needed to type out birthday.

 

 

Dear XX,

The Boy's and I send love & kisses too you.

I wish you were at my b-day. I have my own e-mail now!

Please e-mail me ASAP! Wish you were here.

Love

XX

[LNC]

No apostrophe in boys. Don't capitalize boys. Write to you instead of too. HTH!

[Herding Cats in NC]

My kids like the books by Lynne Truss. Her one on apostrophes is The Girl's Like Spaghetti: Why, You Can't Manage without Apostrophes!

[ekarl2]

Apostrophes are used (mostly) to show ownership or possession. If you're only making a plural, you don't use an apostrophe.

 

When you are forming the possessive, use the following rules:

- take a singular noun and add 's

---- lady=lady's, baby=baby's, boy=boy's

- take a plural noun that ends in s and add just an '

---- ladies=ladies', girls=girls', boys=boys'

- take a plural noun that DOESN'T end in s and add 's

---- children=children's, men=men's, people=people's

- take a name ending in s of more than one syllable and add '

---- Mr. Ellis=Mr. Ellis', Hercules=Hercules', Jesus=Jesus'

- when a one syllable name ends in s, you add 's

---- Chris=Chris's, Mr. Moss=Mr. Moss's

 

Here's a trick: Rather than trying to remember all those rules, learn to "flip the possessive phrase around."

 

If you take this unpunctuated sentence:

 

The boys basketball team won their game.

 

The boys basketball team IS the basketball team OF THE [boys]. Now, freeze frame the word in the brackets in your head. To make a word possessive, you must always ADD TO IT, you can't go inside the word itself. So, we have BOYS frozen, right? So, following the rules above, BOYS is a plural, so it gets an ['] ADDED to it.

 

I hope this helps. If you're ever not sure, strip away the apostrophe and everything after it from the word you're wondering about. The OWNER should be what's left. So, if you look at this sentence:

 

The boys went to the boy's department.

 

Well, the first boys is not a possessive, so it's correct the way it is. The second one, though, if you take away the 's, you end up with "the department of the boy." Does that only belong to ONE boy? No! So it should be "boys' department."

 

Blessings,