“Abuse of the apostrophe is … a symptom of its very character. It is obedient, enthusiastic, and capable of carrying out many important tasks. A bit like a spaniel, you might say. However, that’s where the analogy ends, because we are usually quite nice to spaniels.”
As my loved ones know only too well, I have a bit of a thing for punctuation and grammar. I often have to suppress a shudder at the over-enthusiastic use of apostrophes. I can’t send a text message without reading it over twice. And I sometimes put semicolons in my emails.
But despite the tutting and rolling of eyes at badly-punctuated local newsletters and online reviews, secretly I know that it’s not the be-all and end-all if people get it wrong sometimes. In fact (big confession time) I’m not sure of the rules myself a lot of the time. I have a love-hate relationship with those semicolons: I want to use them to jazz up my writing, but I’m terrified of including one incorrectly (yes, I said terrified). Not to mention that I’ve always been puzzled by where you’re supposed to put the punctuation marks when your sentence ends with speech or a quote: inside or outside the speech marks?
TheBrontëSister 