Do we really need apostrophes?
When you send a text message, you probably do not bother with apostrophes right? It makes sense that we might not worry about properly punctuating possessives and contractions in a text message, but it’s very important to remember that we do need to use apostrophes correctly in other writing situations.
Academics frequently debate about whether or not text messaging is going to kill the poor apostrophe. In his essay “Dear Apostrophe: C Ya,” Rob Jenkins (2012) writes, “[O]ne of my professors, talking about the way language evolves over time, predicted that the next evolutionary stage would involve common punctuation marks. Specifically, he said, the apostrophe would eventually cease to exist” (para. 1).
This may be true, but the apostrophe is not dead yet!
So if you have been text messaging so long that you forgot what the apostrophe is for, the following pages should be helpful.
