I had an interesting freelance writing experience this week, and have new found respect for the humble apostrophe and its other punctuation cousins. I’ve been taking them for granted, and I want to make amends. The client had very specific criteria, not just about content, but right down to punctuation. Now I’m used to style guides, but this had more to do with article submission software eccentricities than actual writing.

Punctuation Embargo

Firstly, no apostrophes were to be used. I couldn’t say “couldn’t”. It had to be “could not!” Oops - no exclamation marks allowed either! The only punctuation that could be used were commas, dashes, question marks and periods (we call them full stops in Australia). Oh, how I missed those apostrophes, semi colons, colons, quotation marks, exclamation marks and ellipses. To top it all off, the writing was about a technical subject, but had to be written in a conversational style. Yikes!

Writers Are Word Weavers

As writers, we spin, coax, mold and tweak words till we have them just where we want them, just as a musician arranges his notes, or an artist adds the faintest nuances of color. I’m not a fan of writing exercises to build writing muscles, but this was like one of those, and I actually enjoyed the challenge of writing articles that still had a natural flow, met all the quite limiting criteria, and that I was still happy to have my name associated with.

Apostrophe Catastrophe Averted

It gave me new respect for the humble apostrophe in conversational writing. “Let us…” doesn’t sound quite right, when you wanted to say “Let’s…” And then there’s dealing with ownership or possessive case - “You’ll like Jill’s new book.” would have been a double apostrophe catastrophe according to the client’s specs. Ironically, while I was mulling over the article content, I drove past a store owner’s sign. It mocked my apostrophe drought, proudly proclaiming “Buy your juicy apple’s here.” - an apostrophe going to waste where it wasn’t needed, while I was on a 24 hour apostrophe embargo! How cruel. Mulling it over gave me some ideas, though. Regular readers at Grow Your Writing Business know that I sometimes do my best writing when I’m not writing.

How About You? Give Your Writing The Punctuation Embargo Onceover

I think this was actually good for me as a writer. It stretched me, and made me look carefully at sentence structures, and how I could say things differently, but just as effectively. Glance at your most recent post or writing. Have you been taking the humble apostrophe and its punctuation family for granted? Could you do without them long term? Have you ever had very restrictive requirements of any type when writing? I’d love to hear about them.

The New Sport of Punctuation & Word Gymanastics

I’m small fry in the new sport of punctuation and word gymnastics, compared with the guy who wrote a 50 000 word book without using the letter “e”. Perhaps to make up for ignoring the letter “e”, he went on to write a second book, in which the only vowel used was “e”. Another guy wrote a book without using a single verb. Try some punctuation or word gymnastics on even a sentence or two. It’s good writing and brain gymastics too, and it’s not as easy as it sounds.

Writing Know How