Strive Notes

It’s a lovely summer’s day – well, actually, it isn’t – it’s overcast, spitting with rain and July. But I use this sentence to illustrate another apostrophe crime. Sorry to go on about it, but every day I get emails that betray the fact people just don’t get it.

Today, for example, I received this within an email. It was ‘a pleasant summers night.’ Pleasant the night may have been, but the lazy lack of apostrophe has ruined the picture painted and side tracked me from what the email was all about!

The night ‘belonged’ to summer, so requires an apostrophe. If it is plural: ‘In three days’ time’ it goes after the ’s’. The trouble with emails is, they illustrate so frequently how poor the standard of general grammar is. Even my spell check doesn’t pick up the fact it’s a mistake, so if people bothered to resort to that, it wouldn’t help.

It just isn’t good email etiquette to reply with a corrected version of the original, is it? Should this quest to lift the standards of grammar in general be so great to risk being rude? Does it matter that much, or would they just think I was showing off and should fixate on something important? What do you reckon?

Filed under: writing