More confusion to avoid

Last time we considered how commas can confuse. Apostrophes and hyphens are punctuation marks that can also cause confusion if used incorrectly.

Apostrophes

The butler stood at the door and called the guests names. This sounds like the butler might lose his job because he’s name-calling. The correct punctuation is: The butler stood at the door and called the guests’ names.

We use apostrophes with nouns to show belonging. So houses means more than one house, but house’s means something belonging to the house.

Apostrophes are also used to show something is missing, such as when we leave out letters in contractions like I’m for I am.

Sometimes people confuse it’s and its. It’s is a contraction that means it is or it has. Its means belonging to, for example, The dog was eating its food.

Another common mistake is adding apostrophes to words that are plural like the 1980’s or before the “s” in a decade: 80’s. But it is correct if there are numbers missing, for example, ’93 for 1993.

Hyphens

The right use of hyphens is important too. Look at the difference between these two phrases: Is this a man eating dog or a man-eating dog? Hyphens are generally used when two or more words form a compound adjective describing one noun.

This is the same for ages. For example, I have an 11-year-old boy. The phrase “11-year-old” describes my boy. However, if I wrote My boy is 11 years old, hyphens are not needed because the age phrase is no longer before and directly modifying the noun.

Hyphens can be difficult; if you’re unsure about whether to hyphenate a word, the safest thing to do is look it up in a dictionary. There is also a difference between Commonwealth English and US English with hyphens in prefixes. Commonwealth writing tends to insert clarifying hyphens in words like co-ordinate and no-one.

It’s easy to feel that grammar is something studied at school and we don’t need to concern ourselves with it as adults. But we need to be careful not to confuse our readers.