Problems with the Apostrophe

English, unlike many other languages, does not use many word endings that denote the function a word has in a sentence. What that means is that, in English, we tend to use position within a sentence to help the reader understand how a word is used within that sentence. As a result, we can use the word “shampoo” as both noun and a verb, and we distinguish which it is because of where it is.

• He is shampooing his hair.
• The shampoo is on aisle 5.
• You should buy some shampoo.
• One property of shampoo is its perfume. 

The first is a verb, denoting an action. The second, third, and fourth are all nouns. The first is used as the subject of a sentence, the second is an object of a verb, and the third is the object of a preposition. Simply changing the way a word is used and where it is placed changes its function in the sentence. That is one thing that makes English difficult—parts of speech do not depend on the word itself and they are not indicated by word endings. Parts of speech simply indicate how a word functions within a sentence, which means a number of words can be several parts of speech even within a single sentence.

To further demonstrate, consider the following sentence:

The teacher said that that that that that boy used was wrong.

Most people get a headache just thinking about that sentence, but it is entirely correct. Maybe it’s not entirely clear, but it is correct.

We have five thats here. The first is a subordinate conjunction introducing a subordinate (or dependent) clause. The second is a demonstrative adjective. The third is actually used as a noun, and the demonstrative adjective tells us which “that” we are discussing. The fourth that is another subordinate conjunction. And the last one is another demonstrative adjective, telling us which boy. 

By now, most of you are probably just shaking your head, thinking to yourself that grammar nuts are, well, crazy, not to mention wondering just what all this has to do with apostrophes.

Ok, here’s the transition. Apostrophes are used for two things: possessives and contractions. The problem I want to bring up involves possessives.

• Employees’ characteristics
• Students’ satisfaction and loyalty
• Dogs’ bones

 

Most people would look at these and consider them acceptable. They are acceptable. They are not ideal because we have another more concise and easier way of dealing with them. Consider the following:

• Employee retention
• Student health
• Cat box 

Why did we not use the apostrophe in each of these instances? You could say employees’ retention, students’ health, cat’s box, but we don’t. If you were actually trying to be consistent that is what you would do. In each case, the first word operates not as a noun, but as an adjective. We know it is an adjective because of its position in the sentence; it precedes a noun. 

The previous phrases should be treated the same way:

• Employee characteristics 
• Student satisfaction and loyalty 
• Dog bones

Why do we try to make these possessives? I think most of us associate words like employee, student, and cat/dog with the part of speech known as a noun, probably because we were made to memorize lists of nouns, verbs, prepositions, and conjunctions in grade school. 

Most of us figure out how useless that little exercise is, but we still have some carry over. 

(And some of you will accuse me of ending a sentence with a preposition here. I did NOT. Because of how it is used, “over” is an adverb in this case, not a preposition.)

More on passives

(Hiatus from blogging because of editing the last couple of weeks. I’ve had as many as six manuscripts—including two reports, a thesis, articles that keep coming, and a book chapter—sitting on my computer desktop and emails from writers weeping about deadlines. I’m down to two—the thesis and the book chapter, but I have to get those done soon because another thesis is on its way and at least two or three more articles are in the pipeline. I think everyone I know went to work this summer to have a half a dozen articles ready to go by fall, and now they all want it fixed yesterday.)

So, passives. I’ve mentioned that passives aren’t necessarily bad, but that they do cause problems with conciseness and with clarity. Perhaps we should talk about how to identify them.

Simple answer: turn on the computer grammar checker. I recall telling my husband, after his stint with the federal government and their idiotic writing rules, that his writing was full of passives. If he wanted to keep the page limits required by journals, or at least avoid paying the extra page charges, he needed to identify them and get rid of as many as possible. He didn’t believe me until grammar checkers turned up, and then he discovered that nearly every one of his sentences had a nice squiggly green line under it. 

I said it was the simple answer, but it’s not the complete answer. Grammar checkers use simple rules to find what MAY be passives, but they are wrong about 40% of the time. Worse yet, as we said before, passives are not always bad. Sometimes you need them. So if you take a grammar checker’s word for it, you’ll be revising a lot of writing that doesn’t need revising for all the wrong reasons.

I’ve had students tell me that other teachers (usually in high school) told them never to use any form of the verb to be. From what I can tell, the teachers never explained why, although that may have been inadequate reporting from the students instead of inadequate teaching. I suspect that teachers who tell their students not to use am, is, are, was, and were are trying to prevent their students from using passives. Unfortunately, this method doesn’t work. 

Let me explain. (Those who know something about the English language have my permission to skip this. I’m over-simplifying.)

English generally has two types of sentences. One type is what I call a subject-linking verb-completer sentence (S-LV-C). These sentences use verbs that operate much like an equals symbol (=). 

• The man is thirsty.
• The woman is a doctor.
• The dog seems friendly.
• The football player turned pale.
• Bread becomes stale quickly in a dry climate.

Note that in each case what follows the verb says something describing (or completing) the subject. The subject is not doing anything. The most common linking verb is to be. If you do what your high school English teacher instructed, you will be eliminating perhaps half of all the sentences you want to use. That’s not a good plan. Much of what we write about involves a state a being, not a state of doing.

Actually, these types of sentences are the least likely to be turned into passives. It’s just too awkward. However, if you write one of them and turn on the grammar checker, most of the time the grammar checker will tell you that you may have a passive and would you please review what you have done.

The other type of sentence we typically use is the action (not active) sentence, where the verb involves some action that the subject is doing.

• Birds fly south in the winter.
• Cows eat grass.
• Farmers grow corn.
• That dog bites people.

In this sort of sentence, we have the actor (birds, cows, farmers, dog), the action (fly, eat, grow, bites), and in some cases the acted upon or object of the verb (grass, corn, people). South, by the way, is not an object, just so you know. It’s an adverb.

This type of sentence is the kind that gives trouble. Every sentence that has subject-verb-object (S-V-O) can be written as passive (which isn’t necessarily bad, as I keep saying).

• Grass is eaten by cows.
• Corn is grown by farmers.
• People are bitten by that dog.

Note that, in every case, the sentence is longer in passive voice than in active voice. That’s problem number one. 

Problem number two? In English, we use position to determine a word’s role in the sentence. We don’t use word endings much. So in a basic sentence like S-V-O, we expect the actor to come first, the action to come second, and the acted upon to come third. What happens if the object comes first and the actor comes last? We have to rethink the entire sentence, and very often, we have to reread the sentence, especially the long ones. That takes time we could better spend doing something else.

Problem number three? In passive sentences, it is easy to leave essential information out. At that point, especially in technical and scientific writing, we have a very real problem. We must have all the essential information. Let’s have a closer look at this. Consider the following scenario:

You have a son who played with the neighbor’s dog. The dog bit the boy. You take your son to the emergency room and run in yelling, “The boy was bitten! The boy was bitten!” What is the first question the ER people will ask?

>> 

Wrong. They’ll ask if you have insurance (/facepalm). I’ve been telling that same joke for the last 20 years. I must stop.

Think about it though. You have left out a critical piece of information. Does it make a difference if the boy was bitten by a dog as opposed to say, a tick? Proper treatment requires complete information. 

Good science requires complete information. Passives get in the way.

Is it Nato or NATO?

A question from Wyoming Bill: 

Argh. It is "NATO". Not "Nato". I don't like this British trend. What does +Nora Ransom think?

From Wikipedia:
"While acronyms have historically been written in all-caps, British usage is moving towards capitalizing only the first letter in cases when these are pronounced as words (e.g., Unesco and Nato), reserving all-caps for initialisms (e.g., UK and USA)."

My answer:

That's not something I've seen before. An acronym is an abbreviation, as you probably know, and not all abbreviations are capitalized. I'd be tempted to point out that an acronym of a proper name, just as an abbreviation of a proper name, should be in all caps, so UK, but NATO as well, although mm and wysiwyg. Radar, scuba, and sonar would be special cases because they have actually become words, which is not likely to be the case for NATO. Does that make sense?

And a few comments:

An acronym is an abbreviation that can be pronounced as a word. So UK is an abbreviation while NATO is an acronym.

Abbreviations and acronyms, unless they are universally recognized, should be defined.

A large number of acronyms have entered the English language as words.

            Sonar: Sound navigation and ranging

            Scuba: Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus

            Radar: Radio detection and ranging

            Laser: Lightwave amplification by stimulated emission of

                       radiation

Wisiwyg never made it although I still occasionally hear it from computer programmers (what you see is what you get).

Nearly everything about writing should made a certain amount of logical sense. Of course, whose logic and whose sense is another discussion for another day.