Apostrophes or is it apostrophe's?

[lph]

Late in. I have my pet peeves, but then I have my blind spots too. I can blame them on being bilingual but truth is there's a limit to how much I want to check on my posts.

A few thoughts: good spelling, grammar and syntax are assets when trying to communicate well. But so is a clear idea of what you're trying to say, to whom. You have terrible spelling and still get your idea or message through loud and clear, and you can write technically flawlessly, and have people going "huh?" It's the idea that gets communicated in the end that matters most to me, not the technique along the way. And on this board I enjoy a lot of the random rambling too.

Back to apostrophes: in Norwegian we use a single apostrophe to indicate possession if the name ends in a s, like Jesus' someone mentioned above. Is this not used otherwise in English at all? I think it looks rather elegant

[skhill]

Veronica, thanks for teaching your students these sorts of things. I used to work in our public community college, and I was appalled at the inability of most of the students to write a complete sentence. These days, one of my friends teaches English at a for-profit technical school; we can all tell when she's been grading papers from her foul mood. She says most of her students are functionally illiterate, despite having a GED or high school diploma.