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Bob McCalden

October Newsletter


Dear APS members,


As always, I'm pleased to welcome all our new members this month to the Apostrophe Protection Society, and to once again thank existing members for being there and for supporting the APS. It means a lot to me, so thank you.


I've had a couple of emails over the past month from members commenting that they had found the email format, and font size, of these newsletters a little difficult to read. As you may have noticed (though different email clients and browsers may display in different ways), I've increased the font size in this newsletter to help with readability. I welcome comments on whether you find this larger font helpful or, conversely, if you think it makes it less readable. I had previously been posting the newsletters onto the blog page shortly after emailing, but I'll now post the blog first so you can read it there if you prefer. There's a link to the blog post version of this newsletter at the bottom of this email.


In last month's newsletter, I was thrilled to report that membership of the APS had risen to over 1800, largely as a result of the media attention in the preceding weeks. You can find copies and/or links for all the newspaper, magazine and radio coverage on the APS blog page on the website. Now that the media frenzy has died down, growth is back to more normal levels, but I'm still pleased to report that membership now stands at over 2100. It's particularly pleasing as I only introduced APS membership at the beginning of this year. Thank you, all.


I've had quite a few emails from members over the past month asking for guidance on how to write possessives for names ending in "s" (such as James), and also for the possessives of plural nouns that don't end in "s" (such as children). I've updated the "Apostrophe Use" page on the website with some simple guidance on these points, so head over to that page if you're interested.


Thank you to those members that have emailed over the last month with some great photo examples of apostrophe misuse. I've put most of them on the "latest examples" page on the website, so have a look there for some truly shocking examples of apostrophes that shouldn't be there and apostrophes that are missing. Please continue to send them in.


My next area of focus is going to be on road names and apostrophes. I made reference to place names and apostrophes in the July newsletter but road names seem to be a bigger issue, particularly in some parts of the UK where apostrophes are getting dropped at an alarming rate. If your local council has dropped, or is dropping, apostrophes from road names that have historically had one, please let me have details and I can start to build a campaign. For those of you from outside the UK (a significant proportion), please excuse the UK focus on this, but I'd love to know what your countries are doing with apostrophes in road names, so please let me know.

My other, non-APS, focus this month is on moving house, so please excuse me if I am a little distracted from apostrophes over the next few weeks!


Once again, thank you for being members of the APS.


Best wishes,

Bob


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