Mon. 3/31/08: Apostrophes

AIM: What do we watch out for, punctuation-wise, as we write our blogs?

1. You will need to continue with another post today. It will be your seventh post.
2. Go back to correct the grammar, spelling, and punctuation in your old blog entries. One thing I notice is incorrect use of the apostrophe, which looks like this: '
3. The apostrophe is for two uses: To show a contraction, like "don't" or "they're", and to show ownership, like "Mr. Power's bike" or "my blog's pictures."
4. In a contraction, the apostrophe always always always goes where you took out some letters to make the two words shorter: "they are" becomes "they're" by taking out the letter 'a', so you put the apostrophe where the 'a' used to be.
5. When using the apostrophe for ownership, remember that it goes before the letter "s." Many people (adults included!) think they need to put apostrophes after every word, but they are just overusing it. Fix up your apostrophes in your old blog entries!