🏁 Don’t use an apostrophe when you’re just talking about two or more things and need to put an ‘s’ at the end, e.g. shoes, cars and boats.
For example, you write I like electric cars, not I like electric car’s.
📲 💻You can use this link to a Google Form so you can test you’ve got it.
🔆 If you’d like a few more tests to be sure, you can go to the apostrophes test page and have a go at the online exercises, and then go to Skill 21 when you’re happy with them.
🛠 If you still need a bit more advice and practise, read on.
🎯 📝 Try rewriting these sentences. All the apostrophes in them are wrong and need to be removed:
The car’s were all expensive.
The horse’s loved running round the track.
I always took both my dog’s for a walk every day.
I have two phone’s, an iPhone and an Android one.
✅ The sentences should look like this:
The cars were all expensive.
The horses loved running round the track.
I always took both my dogs for a walk every day.
I have two phones, an iPhone and an Android one.
🚦Time for more?
One of the last, and most common mistakes to make with apostrophes, is when people get confused with words (nouns, or the names of things) that are made into plurals (more than one of something, e.g. cars) by adding -s. Because the ‘s’ is added on, people get confused and add an apostrophe as well.
This mistake is so common it even has a name: the greengrocer’s apostrophe, e.g. apple’s, pear’s, banana’s and so on, as it’s often seen on market stalls and in shop windows where more than one of something is being sold. One way to remember it is to learn this phrase: Just because it’s more than one, doesn’t mean you need one!
However, a last one that catches people out is one we describe plural numbers, but want to use the digit and not the word. Let’s say I have three 3’s and two 8’s in my hand at a card game. Do you see how we can use the apostrophe to help make clearer that we have more than one of something that has its own number?
You should have a go at the apostrophe and punctuation tests on the pages at the end of the Skills 11-20 menu, and see how much you remember before moving on to the next set of skills.
Congratulations for getting this far- your accuracy may already have improved a lot!
🇺🇸 *Okay, for our American readers, fenders, not bumpers!