As part of SAID & DONE's interest in helping people communicate, we post this article about the apostrophe. You may have noticed that our blog posts now use a word and put a brief definition in parentheses (  ) after that word. This is because we know that many people whose native language is English need or want to improve their vocabulary knowledge. The other reason we are doing this is because we assume that some of the readers will be persons whose native language is not English and who are in need of vocabulary building, and others may have a learning disability such as dyslexia. We hope that these mini definitions will be helpful.

I get comments regularly about the problem of showing ownership in writing. Most people know that there is an apostrophe involved - and why do all these sentence and grammar body parts have to have such hard-to-spell names anyway? Apostrophe to me sounds like a religious term - similar to apostles and apostates.

For some funny musings on grammar and punctuation, visit the Oxford University Press blog. Here is a post on apostrophes: http://blog.oup.com/2008/07/apostrophes/.

According to the post above, the apostrophe invaded the English language in the 16th century, unluckily for us.

Other languages with which I am familiar (in order of the onset of my exposure in life: Polish, French, Italian, Spanish, and Arabic) do not burden the speaker and writer with a pesky mark to show ownership - they simply add the word "of" or put the word for the owned item in front of the word for the owner. So in English to express the fact that the boy owns a hat you would say or write the phrase "boy's hat", in Arabic you would say "hat the boy," and in French or Spanish you would say "hat of the boy." I won't go into Polish because it is a more complex language similar to Latin in its use of confusing endings to words for different situations.

Back to the invasion by the apostrophe...it was first used to substitute for missing letters in common speech. It is still used this way in contractions: won't, don't, isn't, wouldn't, let's, would've (which many people think is 'would of' but it is really 'would have'). The apostrophe stands for a missing letter or letters. So to spell these correctly, just think of which letters would be there if you said both words in the contraction, and put the apostrophe where the deleted letters would be.

To handle possessives (ownership) simply write the word that is showing ownership without any apostrophes.

Let's say you are trying to communicate that the girl has a book.

You know that you will at least write 'girls.' Go ahead and write it.

Now examine the word and ask yourself how many girls there are - just one.

So draw a vertical (up and down) line in a place that breaks 'girls' into a word that shows one girl and the s on the other side: girl (your vertical line would go here) s.

Now erase the bottom part of the vertical line and just leave a small part at the top. That is your apostrophe. Now write the word showing what the girl owns to the right of girl's: girl's book. There you have it.

If more than one girl owns a book or books, write the word girls as you know that is going to be written to start with.

Where would you put your vertical line to show the number of girls being more than one?

Right. To the right of the word: girls (your vertical line here). Now erase the bottom part of the line: girls'.

Next post will deal with trickier possessive nouns (girl's and girls' are possessive nouns; possessive means owning or having something, from the root word possess (own) and nouns are words that name a person, place, or thing).

I think we should change some of the grammar and punctuation names to something that is easier to understand. Maybe the apostrophe should be called a handle, as if you own something you may hold onto it by a handle of some kind.

Homework: Practice Makes Perfect. Go write something to promote your business or cause and use two different possessive nouns - one that has one person/'place/thing owning something, and another that has more than one.

Singular example: Our store's anniversary is in August....

Plural example: The girls' night out that we are offering...

And please consider contacting SAID & DONE for help with your communications. We are now offering social media setup: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, blogs, etc., and we can still help you with copywriting for your email newsletters, brochures, and more. If you need a logo, we can help with that as well. Another upcoming service is installing easy to use websites that you can log into and update yourself with just a username and password in a window that looks like a Microsoft Word document. And we try to do all this at a very economical price. Email us at info@saidndone.com!