All posts tagged plurals

More words that were formed by mistake

As with the first list of words formed by mistake, I’m not passing judgement on these malformations. Okay, may be a little bit with webinar and leverage as a verb. With most of these words I’m simply enjoying their irregular routes into the dictionary. Some have charmed their way in, others got misheard, all have [...]

Words that were formed by mistake

Words come into being in all sorts of ways. They are adopted from other languages (anorak), created by affixing (beauti-ful) or removing affixes (editor), and made by joining (football) or blending (blog) words together. Some words get converted to a different part of speech (to table) or are based on sound (click). There are acronyms [...]

5 demonic mistakes to exorcise when you edit

Have no mercy. Cast them out of your copy. Now. These are vital corrections to make when you edit your writing before publication, otherwise you will look like an amateur.

I know the second one is controversial. Get over it. Straighten up and fly right.

Apostrophes: do you know the only rule?

I helped a friend recently who was editing some training materials. He got stuck on when to use an apostrophe in the following examples. Which of these needs one and where?

Type 1s are the creative thinkers in the team
In threes attempt the first exercise

That’s right – neither needs an apostrophe. 1s and threes are simply plurals. So no apostrophe is needed. Perhaps this is a little tricky, because of the question of whether to write out numerals or not, but I can’t help thinking that dealing with apostrophes is really very simple. In fact, it all comes down to just one rule.