Apostrophe Dos and Don'ts

One of my greatest fears is that one day the plural apostrophe ("Take off your hat's and coat's.") will become accepted standard usage. The error is so widespread on the internet and in the real world that I fear the sheer volume of uncorrected uses will eventually lead to a change in official position, as it did for the new definition of the word literally: "Used for emphasis or to express strong feeling while not being literally true" (Google). Language is fluid and occasionally arbitrary, and the rules seek to reflect genuine usage, so the plural apostrophe may have its day. If it does, we will no longer be able to tell plurals and possessives apart--which is why we invented apostrophes--and I will probably take my own life.

I bet Zappa has an opinion on this subject. And he's
probably right. I mean, look at that mustache.

Apostrophes confuse a lot of people. I'm one of them. The title of this page is a peculiar and confusing case in itself: most writers have an urge to put an apostrophe in the plural of "do" in order to avoid confusion, but the word "don't" already has an apostrophe in it. So should we write it do's and don't's? Or dos and don'ts? Or should we be inconsistent with apostrophe use, and write it do's and don'ts? Thankfully, the wise and oracular Grammar Girl has already weighed in on this subject. She's the final authority for me, and it's her recommended usage you see at the top of this page. When I read it, I can't help but think of an early text-based computer operating system, but hey, sometimes you just have to pick a rule and go with it.

In the spirit of keeping written English sane and sensible, I present the best list of apostrophe rules I could come up with. Keep in mind that some of these rules are not universally agreed upon. In fact, I'm not even consistent with which style guide I follow. I follow the rule that makes the most sense to me logically, and I respectfully submit them for your perusal.

Do

• Use apostrophes in contractions: Can't, won't, I'll. This is the reason we invented apostrophes: to stand in for omitted letters. Be careful though, not to overuse ugly, non-standard contractions in order to capture the rhythm of speech; "This's Bill." (which sounds identical to "This is Bill."), or "Bill'll get you fixed up." Phrases like this may make sense in speech, but they're horrid to look at on the page.
• Use apostrophes for omitted numbers as well: the '60s. Notice, however, that the apostrophe is not placed between the 0 and the s. The apostrophe stands in for the 1 and the 9, but putting it between the 0 and the s make the word possessive, which is not what you want,
• Use an apostrophe and and s for possessive nouns: Sally's car, the company's building, the constable's billy club. The other reason we invented apostrophes.
• If two people own something jointly, only the last one needs and apostrophe: "Bill and Joan's house is for sale."
• If each person has their own thing, both take apostrophes: "Bill's and Joan's cars are brand new." [While correct, I find this phrasing awkward. I would probably rephrase to simply say "Bill and Joan have new cars" or "Their cars are new."]
• If you substitute a pronoun for one person, it needs to be possessive: "My and Joan's son is going to Stanford" [Again, correct, but awkward, I'd prefer "Our son is going to Stanford."]
• Use an apostrophe and an s for possessive singular nouns, even if the word itself ends with an s: Marcus's favorite bar, Kansas's new statute. [William Strunk Jr. is with me on this one. Grammar Girl is not, although she does point out that it's simply a matter of which style guide you refer to. This is one of the few cases where I deviate from Grammar Girl, and here's why: using the extra s gives you an easy way to distinguish between nouns that happen to end in s, and plural nouns, as in the next rule.]
• Use an apostrophe without an s to indicate possession for plural nouns ending in s: My parents' house, the Jones' pool party, Ladies' night at the dance club.
• Use an apostrophe and an s to indicate possession for plural nouns that do not end in s: The children's table, the geese's habitat.
• Some phrases are tricky: For example, "For goodness' sake" takes an apostrophe. But think about it. In this case "goodness" is used like a possessive noun. Whose sake? Goodness' sake. Another sticky spot is the American holiday Veterans Day. The official, government mandated spelling does not have an apostrophe, even though it is a day to celebrate all veterans' sacrifice (notice the apostrophe following the plural s). If in doubt, check the official spelling.
• Use apostrophes to pluralize single letters: This only happens when you are referring to the letter itself: "This word has too many e's." "Dot the i's and cross the t's." This rule is especially important when writing about a's, i's and u's, because it helps avoid confusion with actual words.
• Use apostrophes to pluralize numbers: 1's and 2's. This is essentially the same rule as above, and feel free to use it when referring to the actual numerals. But in my writing I always write out any number, plural or singular, that can be written in four words or fewer. So I would write "ones and twos" instead of 1's and 2's. [For more on this, check out my article on numbers]
• Use apostrophes for quotes within quotes. "I heard him say 'Sherry got a nose job' over at the bar." This goes for scare quotes (sarcastic quote marks) within dialogue as well: "Yeah, I was upstairs 'doing my homework.' " [Technically, for quotes within quotes you're supposed to use a single quotation mark (according to Grammar Girl), which apparently is a thing, and is distinct from an apostrophe. But I've used dozens of keyboards in my life and I've never seen a single quotation mark on any of them--just a plain ol' apostrophe (that little mark under the tilde on the top left of your keyboard is not a single quote, it's a grave accent, and I have no idea what its for). Personally I don't use smart quotes in my writing, so there's no distinction between open quotes and end quotes, and the apostrophe is just a little straight line. So visually there's no difference. For a more detailed look at quotes within quotes, check out this article on Grammar Book.]
• Use apostrophes to form the past tense and participle of verbed acronyms: Occasionally, it is acceptable to form a verb out of an acronym, and if you need to use the past tense or participle form of such a verb, The Chicago Manual of Style recommends an apostrophe: "He's OD'ing!" (participle) "He OD'd" (past tense). This is especially helpful when writing jargon: "Have you MAC'd that widget?" One common abuse of this rule is to say someone "OK'd" something, but I personally find "OK" to be an abomination in fiction. The word is "okay", and "okayed" looks just fine to me. I'm not above writing "OK" when I'm texting my wife; after all brevity is the soul of the text message. But in fiction, I take a few more pains to use words correctly, and "okay" will always look better. And it's not like anyone is charging you by the letter, so there's no reason to omit the "ay".
• Use apostrophes in the official transliterations of foreign language: Apostrophes are often used to aid pronunciation in official anglicized versions of foreign words. The best example I know is "l'chaim", a Hebrew word for toasting and celebrating. In these cases, there is always an official position for the apostrophe, so it can be thought of more like a letter. "60's" is a punctuation error. "lchaim" is a spelling error.

Don't

• Don't use apostrophes to indicate plurals. I have actually rejected prospective editing clients based solely on this rule. I figure if they don't know this, there is probably a lot more they don't know, and I don't charge enough to teach them.
• WRONG: "We're going to look at a few house's today."
• RIGHT: "We're going to look at a few houses today."
• Don't use apostrophes for emphasis. I'm not sure where this error came from, but I'm guessing it's an over-extension of scare quotes. However it came to be, we need to take it out back and shoot it.
• WRONG: Who is that 'radiant' young woman?
• RIGHT: Who is that radiant young woman?
• Don't use apostrophes to pluralize acronyms. This is another gray area, and the correct usage depends on what style manual you prefer. In some manuals, the apostrophe is considered correct because it stands in for missing letters, just as it does in contractions; CD's is short for compact discs, and the apostrophe denotes those missing letters. I, however, prefer to skip the apostrophe in this case, because you can't put one in for every chunk of missing letters, and the rule of capitalizing acronyms makes it easy to distinguish between CDs (compact discs), and CDS (credit default swap), so the apostrophe does not serve the same purpose it does for single letters.
• WRONG: CD's, DVD's. 
• RIGHT: CDs, DVDs
• Don't use apostrophes to pluralize decades or centuries. Interestingly, Blogger's built-in spell check seems to disagree with this rule and the previous one. I'm getting a squiggly red underline as I type the correct words. This, if anything should indicate that these rules are not set in stone. That said, The Chicago Manual of Style backs me up on this one. The important thing is to pick whichever rule makes the most sense for the type of writing you're doing and be consistent.
• WRONG: 1960's, the early 1900's
• RIGHT: 1960s, the early 1900s
• [As I stated above, you should use an apostrophe to stand in for the missing numbers when you abbreviate decades, but it should not go between the 0 and the s. '60s is correct, although as I point out in my article on numbers, I prefer to write decades out: Sixties.]
• Don't use apostrophes in possessive pronouns. Pronouns have their own form to indicate possession; we write his, hers, and theirs instead of him's, her's, and they's (using words like that to capture dialect might be okay in moderation, but overuse will make you look stupid).
• The difference between its and it's is a confusing case for many. I myself struggled with it for years, and I still slip up on occasion. The possessive form of the pronoun it contains the same letters as the contraction for "it is", but remember, possessive pronouns never take apostrophes. Contractions always do.
• Lets and let's is another tough one for most people, including myself. Lets is a present-progressive verb: "He lets me sit up front." It indicates an ongoing state of allowance. Let's is a contraction of "let us": "Let's go to the store." Remember, contractions always take apostrophes. And present-tense verbs don't need them!

Maybe Sometimes

• Use apostrophes to capture dialect sparingly. "I's talkin' to him, but he ain't listen." Using this device too much makes your writing hard to read, and I generally frown upon phonetic spelling of dialect, but sometimes it works. If you're writing period fiction, it may even be necessary, as apostrophes were much more common before spelling was as standardized as it is today. Just be sure not to overdo it, or readers will have to work so hard to understand what you're saying they won't have any attention left for your story.

Any other odd apostrophe situations I didn't cover? Any rules you disagree with? Let me know in the comments below!

Common Style Problems (FenCon Writer's Workshop Part 3)

Editors and publishers all have their pet peeves, and most of them are founded on reasonable principles. Ultimately, writing style is all about making your story easier to read, and good editors will always try to push you in that direction.

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The following series comes to us from guest blogger and author Tom Howard.

Learn more about Tom by visiting his Amazon Author Page, and check out Tom's latest story in The Good Fight, an anthology of superhero vs. monster stories.

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FenCon--a long-running science fiction and fantasy convention in Dallas, Texas--hosts an affiliated writers workshop every year, where professional writers share their own experiences with beginning writers in intensive workshops.

My own writing is at a too comfortable plateau, and I attended to learn some new skills to improve my writing. I've enjoyed FenCon writing workshops before and always find something to take away.

I attended the workshop with my friend and frequent collaborator, Belinda Christ. I think she has attended them all. Like me, she's always searching for community and new tools to improve her trade.

This year, 2015, urban fantasy writer, Jaye Wells, did a four-day class for a dozen writers on critiquing each others' work. Ms. Wells used our comments as a springboard to present sessions on structure, conflict, and the other areas writers need to learn their craft.

Part Three - Common Style Problems

The following list of style problems rank among the most aggravating to editors and publishers. Do everything to avoid them.

• Too many that's. The word "that" is almost always clutter. Occasionally, you need it for clarity, but 75% of the time, it can be left out.
• Bad Dialogue Punctuation. Not knowing where to use your commas and periods is a sure path to the slush pile. Pick up a novel and punctuate the dialogue as the author does. [Pete: and check out my post on dialogue mechanics.]
• Missing comma before direct address. "Good morning, O'Dell." not "Good morning O'Dell."
• You don't need the speaking verb (said) if you have an action line surrounding the dialogue. [Pete: for more on this, check out my post about beats]
• Fancy synonyms for "said". Action lines are best, but some old-school editors insist on only using "said". But the worst thing you can do is use a thesaurus to keep from using "said". Obscure synonyms are distracting, and adverbs and adjectives should be avoided in dialogue.
• Too many subordinate clauses and participle phrases. "As" and "ing" phrases are a matter of timing. They show two actions happening simultaneously, and some things you can't do simultaneously.
• Cliche beginnings. Don't start the story with a line of dialogue. Or with a character waking up. Or with the weather.
• Ellipses fever. It's tempting to use ellipses every time you want a drawn out pause, but it also gets annoying to look at, and readers skip over them more often than not. Know how to use them correctly. In dialogue, ellipses indicate trailing off, an em dash (—) indicates interrupting.  One in every paragraph is not acceptable. And don't use ellipses to indicate pauses in middle of dialogue. Break up dialogue with action.
• Tense shifts. Past tense should be past and present should be present for the entire thing. No shifting back and forth.
• Risky grammar. If you're going to use conjunctions at the beginning of sentences, know what rules you're breaking. Every time you do this, you risk looking like you don't know.
• Uncommon punctuation. A semi-colon should be used sparingly or not at all. Colons, too.
• Too much narrative distance. Character's voice should not only be dialogue but also the narrative. Third person point of view should be close and not omniscient. Distancing words like "she saw", "she looked", and "she felt" separate the reader from the character. Watch your narrative distance closely.

Jaye Wells' general suggestions:

• Get a copy of Strunk and White's Elements of Style and look up specific questions. No need to read it from cover to cover.
• Use Grammarly to check your work.
• For the Oxford comma (a, b, and c), use the publishing house's style guide, but use the serial comma for clarity.
• Don't spend a lot of money on marketing (cons, readers) when you should spend it on learning the craft. Use margielawson.com if you want to workshops from Margie Lawson personally.
• RWA (Romance Writers of America) does great Craft and Business workshops that apply to all writers.
• The MFA program at Seton Hill is a crash course on writing that equals ten years worth of experience.
• The Rule of Three: If a writer brings up something three times, it is IMPORTANT and will be part of the plot and climax. Conversely, if you mention something more than once, you'd better involve it in the plot.
• Pope in a Pool: Look for opportunities to break up exposition with active events. The pope could be swimming laps in the background during a long exposition dump.

Beats

In real life, we don't have conspicuous, over-taxed speaker attributions telling us how people are feeling.  As humans, we're hard-wired to read the body language of everyone around us, and we constantly assess their emotions on a subconscious level.  

This is possible in fiction as well.  The strongest place to express character emotion in a scene is dialogue.  The second strongest place to put emotion is in beats--moments of body language surrounding the dialogue.

Bob ran his hand up my thigh.  "You're so fucking hot."

Punctuated and paragraphed properly, beats often eliminate the need for speaker attributions entirely.  That doesn't mean you should use them all the time, because a passage too full of beats takes on a stop-start rhythm that itself becomes conspicuous, and conspicuousness is what we're trying to avoid.

I find that 2-3 beats per 10-15 of dialogue is about all you can get away with, though there are surely exceptions.  In general, I recommend a single speaker attribution or beat at the beginning of a two-speaker conversation, and then let the seesaw rhythm carry for as long as it can--usually no more than 5-6 lines before I feel the need to sprinkle in some setting or internal monologue.

If you've got three or more speakers, you'll need either an attribution or a beat attached to every line, so I tend to shoot for about one part body language to two parts "said", and I try to keep three-plus conversations as short as possible.  They're hard to write, and harder to read.

How you write beats--and how many you use--depends somewhat on your POV.  I tend to favor intimate third person in my work, so often what I do is simply describe a bit of body language...

He leaned forward.  "Keep talking."

He thrust out his chest.  "What are you looking at, bro?"

...and let the reader fill in the emotional blanks just as they do in real life.  This has two benefits; 1) the language is immediate and inconspicuous, and 2) it actually pulls the reader deeper into the story by allowing them to participate in building the story world.

In first person, you have the benefit of full intimacy with a single character, so if your POV character has a conscious thought about the speaker, you can work even more layers into the dialogue:

He thrust out his chest.  "What are you looking at, bro?"What a douchebag! "Nothing, sorry."

This not only tells you more about the speaker, but more about the POV character.  The POV character in the above example clearly has a much different personality than the one in the following example:

He thrust out his chest.  "What are you looking at, bro?"Intriguing, how simian dominance behaviors have yet to be bred out of mankind. "Nothing, sorry."

I find, in an intimate third person POV, you can pretty much write internal monologue just as you would in first person, but it behooves the story to keep them to a minimum.  If we pause for our POV character to appraise every line of dialogue, the story fails to proceed.  Moderation is good in first person too, but you have a little more leeway.

Another issue worth pointing out is that when you rely more on body language than attributions, you allow your dialogue to remain grounded in the scene.  Any body language is great, but if you focus solely on people's facial expressions, posture, etc., you'll quickly find that you have tons of scenes where people are constantly grinning, or frowning, or running their hands through their hair, or leaning forward.  The best thing to do is to craft body language that shows characters interacting with the setting around them.

Say you have a heated argument between two lovers.  You could just write them sitting on the couch, or in the bedroom, and they could bandy wits to your heart's content.  But the scene could be spiced up considerably by having them do something.  Could this argument take place during a couples golf tournament?  How about in the middle of cooking dinner (which would give them plates and sauce pots to throw...)?

Any time you can attach a setting to your body language, you not only wind up with fresher, more original body language, you end up with more realistic settings.  Big, thundering blocks of description can be fun to write, but they're...less fun to read.  They're best kept to your notes.  Readers don't remember that stuff anyway. What readers remember is people doing things.  A character acting on an object makes that object real, and invites the reader to fill in all kinds of details surrounding that object.  It's one of the basic ways to show and not tell.

Between beats and good-old "said", you should have 99% of dialogue situations covered.  Sticking to these inconspicuous devices will help you develop that strong, fluid style that keeps readers locked in your story.

Said

In his enlightening book On Writing Stephen King makes a passionate endorsement for the word "said", advising writers to use it in preference to any of its many synonyms.  But, being a writer, not an editor, he doesn't do much to back up his endorsement.

I'm often asked about the word "said".  It's something a lot of writers have trouble digesting, and some even reject the common wisdom outright.  However, I do have an opinion on the matter, and as usual it's a strong one.

I pretty much agree with Uncle Stevie on this one, but On Writing is not the first place I encountered this tip.  My favorite book on the craft; Dave King and Renni Browne's Self-Editing for Fiction Writers touches on this also.  Their argument is two-fold: first, avoiding the unadorned "said" often forces your character into a physical impossibility.  One does not "gasp" a sentence.  A gasp is, by its very definition, not a sentence.  Second, fancy synonyms for "said" always catch you in the act of stuffing character emotion into what should be a purely mechanical device.  Character emotions do not belong in speaker attributions, they should be present in the dialogue itself.  If that's not possible (and it sometimes isn't), emotion belongs in the pieces of body language surrounding the dialogue (what I call "beats".  More about beats in this post).

Speaker attributions are a mechanical device, and they have but one humble purpose: to identify the speaker.  Ideally, they should be thought of almost like punctuation.  And everyone agrees that over-punctuating makes you look desperate to get your point across!!! Don't you agree???

The beauty of "said" is that it's transparent.  The reader doesn't really even see the word.  Assuming they're sufficiently focused on the story (and not the words on the page) their mind will instantaneously substitute the speaker's identity, and the attribution will have done its job without ever calling attention to itself.  In my opinion, this kind of transparency is the most noble goal a writer can have.

Because "said" is so transparent, anything else in its place becomes conspicuous.  In general, we don't want readers to focus on our words, we want them in the story.  But used properly, the conspicuousness of another verb can actually work to your advantage, provided you aren't using it as a crutch to prop up weak dialogue.

Personally, I feel free to use any verb that denotes the volume, tone, or (occasionally) cadence of a speaker's voice.  Shouted, whispered, whined, or blurted will sometimes find their way into my work, but I use them sparingly because I know that every one is a risk.  Any verb in place of "said" has the ability to knock the reader out of the story, and make them focus on the word itself.  Most of the time, the risk isn't worth it.

Another common problem I see with beginning writers is the inclination to use adverbs to prop up their speaker attributions.  People never just "say" anything, they say it "sarcastically", or "brightly", or "arrogantly.  Again, this catches you in the act of stuffing character emotion where it doesn't belong, but on a grammatical level, it catches you using two words to do the work of one.  Everybody hates it when we see six construction workers standing around watching one guy pour asphalt into a pothole.  Why should we be any less infuriated when words do the same thing?

The reason is of course that when we write a line of dialogue, we hear it in our head.  We struggle to capture the exact way the character said it, because we want the reader to hear it the way we did.  But I find it seldom matters whether the reader hears a line of dialogue exactly the way I heard it when I wrote it.  Part of the joy of reading is that you get to read a story in your unique way, and if I, the writer, force you to read it exactly my way, I rob you of that joy.  It's a perfect example of a writer standing in the way of his own work--sacrificing transparency.

So I've let go of the idea that readers must read every line a certain way, and focus instead on clarity.  I trust my readers to be smart enough to pick up on subtext, and I try to make it easy to pay attention.  And truthfully, if you have to jump through awkward, wordy hoops to ensure that readers hear a line just so, chances are something is wrong with the line itself, and your efforts would be better spent pumping up the dialogue itself.

If you feel the urge to use something other than "said"--or God forbid, to use "said" along with an adverb--what's really going on is you have a character emotion you're trying to work into dialogue.  A speaker attribution is by far the weakest hook to hang emotions on.  The dialogue itself is by far the strongest.  Which has more emotion:

"I find you very attractive," Bob panted arousedly.

or

"You're so fucking hot."

I have found it is usually possible to reword any line so that it carries the proper emotion.  Occasionally though, you will want the dialogue to be slightly off kilter with the emotion, either for comic effect, or because the character feels some need to restrain themselves.  So how do you work those subtleties into a passage of dialogue?  How do we show sarcasm without clunky attributions like "he said sarcastically?" or "he quipped"?  How can we show that a speaker is saying something they don't really believe?

But in those situations, body language can almost always help you, using what Browne and King refer to as "beats".  And for that, you'll have to take a look at the next article.

Often when I express my opinion on this matter, people say "But I see it all the time in published authors' work!!!"  It's true, some authors get away with verbs like "intoned", or "guffawed".  Some editors don't care.  And many readers won't actually notice, or feel intruded upon.  Sometimes, these verbs aren't that conspicuous, because whatever is going on in the scene is sufficiently engaging that we don't notice.  No matter what principle we're discussing, there will always be some author who "gets away with" doing it the "wrong way".

But you don't want to "get away" with your writing, do you?  You don't want your writing to be some savagery you perpetrate on your readers, do you?  If not, stick to "said".