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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Here’s The Catch

Gosh, no matter how careful you are in  editing your blog posts, sometimes there is always an unwanted word  or an unwanted letter that should not be there at all.  Or maybe in your haste to publish what you have written, you don’t see your own mistakes glaring at you in the face. I think the hardest thing to edit is your own work.  I was frowning when I saw these words….when a personS starts….That was the quote I included in my last post. What a shame, personS indeed. It’s the “S” letter and it’s ugly  😦

The proofreader here is not enough because as long as the spelling of the word is correct, even if it was improperly used in a sentence you’ll still get to see “no writing errors were found”.

This reminds me of the late Inday Badiday’s tv program Careful, Careful. 

Even seasoned authors have lapses too in their writings. I see those words especially in e-books. Those memes on Facebook, they make my head ache just reading those things on  my news feed every day, that is why I don’t allow others to post on my wall. No one is allowed to automatically post things on my timeline, I review all tags before I add them up.

How do you use “who” and “that” in your sentence?

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