Don’t Fear the Nazi

The Grammar Nazi. You have nothing to fear from her!

A misplaced apostrophe is difficult for me to overlook, I’ll admit it. But it’s mainly because it’s so pervasive. It’s as if an entire generation – or two – missed the lesson on how this particular little piece of punctuation is used, so they put it everywhere, just in case.

And yes, the careless use of the incorrect there/their/they’re or you’re/your sends me slightly around the bend. But it’s not as if I’m immune from making mistakes. I make my share. But I worked hard at learning grammar because it is important. And people judge you on it, especially in business. Going through the editing process for my first book, Celebrity Tantrums, was a humbling eye-opener. My assessment of writing goes beyond spelling and punctuation to sentence structure, because I was so taken aback by this editor’s rework of my manuscript. I judge the writing of others by how well they apply these things, too. But I don’t judge them.

Or maybe I do.

But only a little and not everything about them! Just whether or not they pay attention to details and have bothered to learn the basics about their own first language.

A couple of friends have confessed that they’re almost afraid to write me a text or a Facebook message in case they make an error. This is silly. I’m not sitting here with a red pen ready to mark up whatever someone sends me if they make a mistake. If I did that, I’d be wiping off my monitor every ten minutes! I kid, I kid.

But seriously.

Chronic poor spellers and those who commit crimes against apostrophes are much different than people who allow the occasional error to slip through. Heck, if not for my Mom, you’d probably see errors here a couple of times a week! They mostly occur in the editing process, when I rewrite a sentence and fail to see where I’ve dropped a word I should have kept. (This is why editors are so important – fresh eyes!) It happens to everyone.

So please, don’t fear the Grammar Nazi. She isn’t after you. She wants the masses to know that you don’t need an apostrophe in a simple plural, unless that plural shows possession. You do need it in a contraction. Not sure if it should go in your “its”? If you can put “it is” in the same place and it works, you need an apostrophe. If you can’t, you don’t. Pass it on.