The Versatile Apostrophe (Part 2)

Judith Nembhard

The other aspect of the word apostrophe is its literary quality, where it is used as a form of address to someone who is absent as if the person were present and able to answer, or it is an address to an inanimate object or an abstraction as if it is capable of hearing and understanding and can respond. This is not as fanciful as it sounds. We do it all the time—talking to our computer when it’s too slow, or telling our alarm clock to be quiet when it rings in the middle of a good snooze. These are not literary by any means, but they are apostrophes nonetheless. Think of the nursery rhyme that you repeated as a child: “Twinkle, twinkle, little star/how I wonder what you are.” And how about “Bah, bah, Black Sheep, have you any wool?” In each case, you were talking to a star and a sheep that couldn’t understand and couldn’t respond. You were using an apostrophe.

I’m sure the poets among us are already acquainted with this form of the apostrophe, and some may have even used it in their pieces. It is a popular devise that poets use to make a point. William Hodgson wrote a well-known poem I learned in grade school. “Time, you old gypsy Man, will you not stay? /Put up your caravan just for a day.” The author appeals to time to slow down, stop flitting so fast, something we all would like to have happen when we are behind schedule.

John Donne’s famous poem “Death Be Not Proud” is one of the best examples of a literary apostrophe. Donne, a seventeenth century poet and Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, seems to shake his fist in Death’s face, letting him know he doesn’t have all the power that he presumes to have. In the end Death will be vanquished, quite reassuring during this time of the dreaded COVID-19 pandemic. Although Death is treated like a person in the poem, it is an abstraction and cannot hear, neither can it respond.

Can the apostrophe be used in narrative fiction? Absolutely! James Joyce did it. At the end of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he has Stephen Dedalus address Life: “Amen. So be it. Welcome, O Life!” Many times the literary apostrophe begins with “O” or “Oh.” It is used to express strong emotion, such as love. If the main character in your short story or novel is in a romantic relationship with a soldier who is far away on the battlefield, what’s to prevent you from having her address him directly out of the depth of her longing for him? It would be a way to show rather than to tell. The technique is a good one but shouldn’t be overdone.

There is much versatility in the apostrophe. Hardly any one individual has a corner on its use either as a mark of punctuation or as a literary device. We would do well to imitate its versatility in the practice of our craft.

Judith Nembhard was born in Jamaica and grew up amid the island’s lush scenery, which influenced her writing. Her early fascination with language led her to complete three degrees in English, including a doctorate from the University of Maryland College Park. Her articles have appeared in professional journals, religious and secular magazines, devotional anthologies, and newspapers. She writes Christian fiction. She has earned writing awards in the Writer’s Digest Writing Competition, Deep River Books Contest, and Southern Writers Magazine Short Story Contest. She is featured in the Southern Writers Magazine Galaxy of Stars.

Her book, Dark Days On The Fairest Island was a finalist in the Southern Christian Writers Conference (SCWC) Notable Book Award in its category.

Judith is a woman of faith and has shared her spiritual vision with audiences at commencement and Women’s Day celebrations and women’s retreats. She has given workshops on writing and improving public speaking skills.


Judith has two adult sons. She has teaching and writing as her greatest loves and reading as her most passionate hobby. She lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

http://judithnembhardbooks.com/

The Versatile Apostrophe (Part 1)

Judith P. Nembhard

Apostrophe: noun. A punctuation mark that shows possession or marks the omission of one or more letters (contraction); a figure of speech

I have heard academics—mainly theology scholars strutting their Greek—complain about the limitations of English when they want to emphasize the special meaning of a word so that their audience will understand better what they are trying to say. They bemoan the fact that English has only one word for love, whereas the Greek has three or four. I take offence at any attempt to detract from the power of the English language. With the word apostrophe, I am pleased to say that English has two totally different meanings for the one word. I hope this is good enough to mollify those scholars.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, the word apostrophe comes from the Greek, and means “a turning away.” An apostrophe, then, refers to letters that have been turned away or left out in order to shorten a word or to make it more easily pronounceable. So it indicates omissions and contractions. It is an essential punctuation mark that writers should be able to use skillfully. In this age of self-publishing, it behooves us writers to be strong on our proofreading skills, which include a knowledge of how to use the apostrophe accurately. I recently listened to a book reviewer on NPR heap praise on a book that he considered powerful in its impact. Its one drawback, he said, was the writer’s mechanical errors. The reviewer mentioned something as simple as making one of the characters in the book say “I have” when “I’ve” would have been more effective in the context. The apostrophe, then, can be seen as useful for improving style.

The apostrophe as a mark of punctuation has a variety of uses. In her humorous book on punctuation, Eats Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss remarks, “There is a rumour that in parts of the Civil Service [in Britain] workers have been pragmatically instructed to omit apostrophes because no one knows how to use them anymore.” She asks, “How dare anyone make this decision on behalf of the apostrophe?” Truss says that a person who has always wanted to know about where to place the apostrophe will never learn “because it’s so extremely easy to find out.” And it is easy to find out from any English handbook so that a lesson in usage is not needed here. A few reminders, however, are worth noting. The apostrophe should not be used to make plurals of regular English nouns. For example: “The two writers (not writer’s) had their novels reviewed favorably.” Also, always place the apostrophe after the plural of a word when it already has an “s” at the end. For example: “Writers’ works must not be tampered with.”

Concerning making the plural of a year, do we write the “1970’s” or the “1970s”? Either one is correct. Words such as who’s and it’s are tricky for some people. Perhaps, like me, you get out your red pen when you read sentences such as “Mr. Pemberton didn’t know who’s play he was reviewing.” The sentence confuses “whose,” the relative pronoun, with the contraction for “who is.” With the apostrophe, it’s always means “it is”; without the apostrophe, “its” is a pronoun. If two characters own the same thing, the apostrophe goes to the second person mentioned; for, example, “Rogers and Hart’s prize-winning play was performed on Broadway.” If the item is owned separately, it is written “Roger’s and Hart’s prize-winning plays were performed on Broadway. “  . . . Part 2 on April 23.

Judith Nembhard was born in Jamaica and grew up amid the island’s lush scenery, which influenced her writing. Her early fascination with language led her to complete three degrees in English, including a doctorate from the University of Maryland College Park. Her articles have appeared in professional journals, religious and secular magazines, devotional anthologies, and newspapers. She writes Christian fiction. She has earned writing awards in the Writer’s Digest Writing Competition, Deep River Books Contest, and Southern Writers Magazine Short Story Contest. She is featured in the Southern Writers Magazine Galaxy of Stars.

Her book, Dark Days On The Fairest Island was a finalist in the Southern Christian Writers Conference (SCWC) Notable Book Award in its category.

Judith is a woman of faith and has shared her spiritual vision with audiences at commencement and Women’s Day celebrations and women’s retreats. She has given workshops on writing and improving public speaking skills.


Judith has two adult sons. She has teaching and writing as her greatest loves and reading as her most passionate hobby. She lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

http://judithnembhardbooks.com/

A Novel Way to Promote Your Writing (Part 2)

Judith Nembhard 
A passionate fiction writer.

          

           Consider also as a possible venue a community senior center. Here the director is tasked with providing varied and interesting activities to keep the clients engaged, and you have just what they need.  Admittedly, there is usually a routine that the center follows, but something different and valuable to the clients, as a workshop on an aspect of the language would certainly be, is an attractive offer, so they would welcome your presentation.

            College English departments also are a fertile resource for presenting a workshop on writing. Most colleges have a campus-wide activity period each semester. A lot of activities go on during this time, organized by clubs and other groups. At such a time, an English professor may invite a guest to his or her class. As an instructor, I invited a writer to my class, and it proved extremely satisfying for both the students and me. Later I, too, was invited to address a group of English majors during one of their activity periods. This is a time when you can give useful highlights on the writing life to young people who may be interested in becoming writers.

A Novel Way to Promote Your Writing (Part 1)

Judith Nembhard   

A Passionate Fiction Writer    



Here’s a piece of writing advice: promote your book, but promote it slant (with apologies to Emily Dickinson), and the way to achieve this slanted book promotion is by doing a workshop. In our quest for tips on how to promote our books, we writers often pore over the pages of Writer’s Digest and other magazines on writing, read books such as Guerrilla Marketing for Writers, and attend writing conferences. From all of these sources, we often get information that is of interest, some of it actually useful. One promotional avenue that you may not have read about, however, is a workshop. You attend workshops to learn new techniques and to brush up on old ones. Well, how about giving a workshop yourself?

Minding Our Modifiers

By Judith Nembhard

Teaching Freshman English made me aware of two of the least talked-about linguistic errors. Sometimes as I graded papers, I chuckled at the unintended humor of some of the students’ dangling and misplaced modifiers. I began collecting examples of “DMods” (our department’s correction symbol for the error).           

What is a dangling modifier anyway?  Find a college handbook (if you don’t Google everything) to get a working definition. In my trusted Practical Stylist, Professor Sheridan Baker exhorts: “Don’t let your modifiers or references dangle” and gives a succinct tutorial. These are words, phrases, and clauses that “tend to slip loose from the sentence and dangle, referring to nothing or the wrong thing.”  An example: “When only a freshman, Jim’s history teacher inspired him.”  A freshman as teacher? How inspiring!             

Careless placement of modifiers often results in confused sentence meaning. Example: I saw several beautiful pheasants on a hike to Soda Springs yesterday.

Hiking pheasants are an unusual sight. Example: The Police Department will be notified of all reported prank phone calls by the telephone company. Which telephone company makes prank phone calls?            .

Seasoned writers can be guilty of faulty modifiers. In my collection is a Washington Post article by an acclaimed writer whom I admire immensely. Here is a sentence from the article. “But before entering high school my father died (I had already lost my mother several years before).”  Such a calamitous situation! Newspapers provide abundant examples. Here’s one from a 1986 “Personalities” column in a major newspaper. .”Democratic Party Activist Pamela Harriman, who has been in Barbados avoiding the Washington winter with her husband is frequently on the phone to Washington organizing her annual fundraiser.” And this example is amazing. “Hospital report: The condition of Apollo astronaut James Irwin, whose heart stopped while jogging last week, was upgraded to fair and stable.” Just inserting “he was” after the word “while” solves the problem.           

How do you avoid this linguistic mishap?

1.     Make sure your modifier has a word in the sentence that it actually modifies and  place them next to each other.

Example: “On the basis of Webber’s testimony, a pale young man with sinkhole cheeks

 named Gary Dobson, spent six years in jail until he was released last week. Place the modifier after “young man.”

2.     Be sure to put the subject in each sentence and clause.

Example (about the death of a local pastor): “While talking with two ladies, the

 ladder slipped, causing him to fall about 15 feet into a stairwell.” Insert “he was” after “While.”

3.     Revise carefully, keeping an eye out for the problem when you do.

Now and again, I find one of these modifiers sneaking into my writing. I try to catch it before the rest of the world does. I don’t enjoy providing untended humor for my readers.

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Judith Nembhard has spent all her professional life in education, in the classroom and in administration. She reads a lot of poetry and loves to teach it but doesn’t write it. She writes Christian fiction that explores her vision of the intersection of faith and daily living, especially in an academic setting. She is originally from Jamaica, and her stories reflect the lush island landscape, a setting conducive to romance. Teaching and writing are her greatest love, and reading is her most passionate hobby. She has two adult sons and lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee.