Tuesday, January 13, 2015

A Grammar Break: The Apostrophe Rule and the First Annual Rule

Once upon a time my life was wholly devoted to copy editing. I spent four years on a copy desk in college at a Student Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper, I interned with the prestigious Dow Jones News Fund at The Denver Post, and I interned and was hired on as a copy editor with The Washington Post (yes, that Washington Post).

Those were the days. The days when I thought I'd be a newspaper girl forever. Unfortunately, those days died with the reality of working from 4 p.m. to midnight while living in a 9-5 uber transient city (Washington D.C.). The two were a terrible match, and I left life as a professional copy editor for good.

These days, I'm mostly a writer. Last night I pumped out 1,000 words in two hours for a website focused solely on Super Bowl ads (I'll admit it was one of the easiest, most fun articles I've written to date). I've written about the Small Business Administration, the website-building platform Wix, Game of Thrones, and, of course, a boatload of articles over on About.com.

Now that I'm mostly in the marketing and content writing game, however, I'm realizing just how bad the world of copy editing and editing in general has become. The amount of silly errors I see in nicely printed materials makes me want to cry. So I've decided to do the world a bit of a favor and provide some fun, sharable graphics with basic grammar rules that are easy to pick up on and use, use, use until the phrase "well, everybody does it that way, so it's okay now" disappears from the atmosphere.

Here are two for today:



Share them, pin them, send them to your company or organization's marketing department or editing desk, and let's change the world — one apostrophe at a time!