The difficulty over the apostrophe starts when we move on to plural nouns. The problem arises from thinking that the apostrophe has something to do with making words plural. It does not. To repeat the point we made earlier: adding’s has nothing to do with making words plural.
We usually make nouns plural by adding s; so, for example, cat becomes cats; student becomes students. There are, though, some words which make their plurals differently: the plural of child is children; leaf becomes leaves; kiss becomes kisses; mouse becomes mice. Most nouns, how... Read more...
[/caption]We use the apostrophe mark to indicate the omission in a standard contraction. We’d better explain the rule about this in some detail as this is where a good deal of the chaos over punctuation starts. If we had to identify one area that creates problems for students, it would be this idea of contractions – that is, where a word is shortened and an apostrophe is used to indicate this.