Apostrophe +S?

Ah, before you react, I want to emphasize that I am not a grammar police.  it’s just that for the past years, the past months and the past several days, I’ve seen this in my news feed on Facebook.

I don’t want to act like a “contrabida” and correct them because they are my friends. There are times though that even the tenses are so glaring, really quite annoying to read. Long before those trolls by the present administration have lorded it over Facebook and some of them were banned this year, I’ve seen these, not just wrong grammar but wrong choices of words. They could have written it in Tagalog better. Shall we say, it’s “nosebleed” reading it at all.

They usually add that apostrophe + S to regular plural nouns. Here’s the simple rule.

 A plural noun is a word that indicates that there is more than one person, animal place, thing, or idea. When you talk about more than one of anything, you’re using plural nouns. When you write about more than one of anything, you usually use the same word, simply adding an s, es, or ies to the end

Do not, I repeat, do not  use an apostrophe + s to make a regular noun plural. Nouns ending in -o can add either -s or -es in the plural, and some can be spelled either way.  With nouns that end in a consonant or a single vowel plus -f or -fe, change the -f or -fe to -ves:  For those ending in y, you change y to ies. 

I often see this: friend’s. They use it as plural form.  Even if English is just our second language, it is quite annoying to see it.

 

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Blogging And Such (Where Did I Make Mistakes?)

Whoa!

In all my seven years in the blogging world, this is the first time that it happened to me. Yesterday I was so disappointed that I lost a 500-letter blog post because I forgot to save it before copying to another site. It was supposed to be a guest post for a friend here who welcomes other bloggers to share their posts on his site. Just click this link to see his wonderful blog. Hi there Pete, maybe some other time, I’ll share a post  on your wall. Much as I want to reorganize my thoughts and rewrite the whole thing, it’s a futile exercise. Maybe the WordPress app read it as “delete the whole thing” when I shaded off the post, ready to copy it but forgot to save it first.

I have always been careful when it comes to publishing new posts. You have to take everything into consideration, the grammar error mostly because when you’re the one who edits your post, there may be spelling mistakes, tenses that do not go well with what you have in mind, words that are not appropriate to use and such. The downside of using the proofread writing app here is that as long as the words are correctly spelled, it would tell you ” no errors were found”.

But there is  good news.

Last July 7, I received a message from WordPress that says;

On Thursday, July 7, 2016 you surpassed your previous record of most follows in one day for your blog DREAMS AND ESCAPES. Nice!
Most Follows in One Day
Current Record: 7
Old Record: 6

What a nice surprise! Since the beginning of the month of July, I noticed a trickle of new followers, one or two max within the day but that was okay with me because it is not every day that you get to meet new bloggers who take time to comment and visit your blog. That’s actually a bonus.  Based on my stats, I earned a following of 30 bloggers since the start of July 2016.  Thank you so much, I would love to return the favor one of these days by visiting your blogs too.

I’ve always been conscious of the remaining 29% free space that I could still use here.  Perhaps you have noticed that I don’t post so many photos like I used to  because they eat up the available space when you are using a free theme. I have another blog for photography which I lately updated, a different blog for the grandson, a new blog called Dreams Never End which I would love to use fully once this is filled up. My  gardening posts are quite erratic since they depend on what I find in my small garden that I would love to share.  Although it does not matter much because I would still share my thoughts here even if only a few read it, I am proud to have 1,667 blog followers, 1,819 posts including this one and a total of 413,032 stats at the moment.

Kudos to blogging. We make mistakes sometimes but they are learning curves too.

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Goodbye January

I can’t believe it. January is almost gone and all I have are eleven  blog posts since the start of the month. The past days, I  struggled with using my tab when posting. It really came in handy while my  old computer has finally gone kaput on me, buried for good this time.  I am using a new one which Josef gave me as a late Christmas gift complete with a 17″ monitor and  is wi-fi ready. This is actually my first post using it.  I don’t know, it might be a blessing in disguise since I was able to catch up on my reading  ( I am on my 10th book on the reading challenge on Goodreads).  One thing I’ve missed while using my tab was the proof-reader.  Sometimes you’ll never know that in the course of typing what is running in your head, you misspell a word that never gets corrected even if you edit your post once or twice.  I am not a lover of the auto-correct features of my cellphones and tab. I often have to go back, erase and retype words since the former  inserts  something far from what I have in mind. It’s crazy, more so when I am texting in Tagalog and it does not have an equal word to substitute.

Thank you so much to those fellow bloggers who recently followed my blogs and thank you too to  those visitors who left inspiring comments on my old posts.  I’ve reached more than 385,000 stats a few minutes ago. It’s a milestone for me.  I didn’t really expect that I’ll get to have this number of visitors in my six years of blogging.  There was a time  during the early years when having a 20 to 50 views in a day was enough for me  but then there are loyal followers and online friends here who visit regularly. Added to that are the views I get daily from my posts as a cancer survivor.  My old posts are more popular than the new ones 🙂

I still get excited publishing a new post. I  am happy seeing new followers and likes.  Of course they add to the joy of writing, getting noticed that is. I try to limit each post from a minimum of 300 words to around 500 words at the most.  It is easier to read a shorter post than a lengthy one.

Where has January gone? February is slowly inching its way. I hope it would bring inspirations for me to blog often and update my other blogs too which I have neglected too long.

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