Community Grammar Guide

Hello, and welcome to the Community Grammar Guide (formerly Ugozima's Grammar Guide), a guide for users on the wiki to make sure that their grammar is correct. This guide will point out some common mistakes and how to correct them.

Possessive
The main use of an apostrophe is to denote possessive ownership of something, usually with an "s" following the apostrophe. For example: "Dan's cats escaped the building." However, if the possessor's name ends with the letter "s," the apostrophe can stand alone with no "s" needed. This is the correct usage: '"Janus' cats escaped the building." This common usage is incorrect: "Janus's cats escaped the building."

Plural
Apostrophes are also often used to denote plural form, but should only be used when having the apostrophe absent would make the sentence confusing. Depending on what word is being used, the usage is either correct or incorrect. This sentence has an incorrect use of a plural apostrophe: "Janus' cat's escaped the building." It is incorrect because the apostrophe in "cats" doesn't make the sentence any clearer. However, this sentence is incorrect as well: "Mind your ps and qs." This is because we need to insert apostrophes into "ps" and "qs," because without them, the sentence is quite confusing. This is the correct form: "Mind your p's and q's."

Contraction
Apostrophes also have another function: they represent the deleted vowels in a contraction. Here is an example: "Here's twenty quid for petrol." In this sentence, the apostrophe in "here's" stands for "i", because the full form of "here's" is "here is."