Stanzas: Monthly Chapbooks April 2015: The Fool | Page 20

The Apostrophe
Mm, yes, Mr. Apostrophe. The ninja of writing. the floating comma. Apostrophes do
a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes, but for the sake of this chapbook, let’s for a
moment focus on just two uses: possession, and contraction.
Possession is when someone or something owns the next word. Confused? Let us
clear it up:
Stanzas’ baseball bat (i.e., a baseball bat belonging to Stanzas for classified purposes.)
Café Noir Hook & Ladder’s coffee (i.e., the coffee belonging to Café Noir Hook &
Ladder which you should definitely buy ‘cos it’s delicious and they let us talk about poetry for two
hours, amiright?)
Contraction is when you take two words and join them together. the apostrophe
takes the place of any letters that might go missing during the merger like, that’s (that
is), we’re (we are) ‘tis (it is).
These are two subtle but succinct differences. Every time you use an apostrophe,
ask youself are you pushing two words together, or does one word own the other?
Also important, if you forget to add in your apostrophe, then you make everything
sound like a plural. For instance:
‘Café Noirs Hook & Ladders coffee’, means all of the Café Noirs Hook &
Ladders in the world, and not our fab little one.
Punctuation
Please, please, please follow these rules. Please! Exclamation marks are great! They
add emphasis! They add immediacy! But if you put them everywhere! It starts to look
childish and annoying! The rule is you should try to avoid exclamation marks except
for in dialogue! If you want to make your prose sound more immediate, find a way of
using words to do it! OK!
The question mark is very specific. It turns a sentence into a question. Simples?
Simples.
…The ellipsis is a series of three periods, like this... It is supposed to be used for
missing text. For example, if you are quoting someone, but the middle part of their
sentence is irrelevant...you can skip over it.
Ellipses do not denote pause, much as the internet likes to use it. If you want to
show pause, use dashes. It looks better.
In all these cases, however you decide to use your punctuation, and wherever you
put them, make sure to only use one. Nothing looks more amateur than !!! or ??? or,
god forbid, ............................
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