Public Service Announcement

August 09, 2004, 1:13 p.m.
There is an epidemic of apostrophe misuse that has taken hold of our society. I blame the Internet. The proliferation of online magazines and blogs has created a population of people who call themselves writers, yet they are not following the basic rule of publishing: Proofread everything before it goes to print.

One of my favorite examples of rampant apostrophe misuse is on the site of a writer who claims she has achieved fortune, fame, and admiration for her work, yet she spells with the same panache as a fourth-grader. Her articles (all self-published, of course) are filled with notes about upcoming sale’s and tales of sipping latte’s while crafting article’s on camera’s.

Admittedly, I knew little about the business of writing when I started out. I bought books on crafting query letters, asked a lot of questions about editor etiquette, and was fortunate to have a mentor that worked through countless article revisions with me. But I could spell.

Before you declare yourself a writer and begin pitching editors, should you not at least know how to spell? Do you not realize how poorly an editor will look upon a writer who is not familiar with the basics of punctuation?

The next time you are sending query’s, working on edit’s, and trying to build publication credit’s, take a minute to recall the lessons you learned about apostrophes when you were little.