Apostrophes and What They're Not Supposed to Do

I admit to being puzzled by people's confusion about the role of apostrophes. I'll also admit that the apostrophe is quite capable of carrying a large load. Their primary role, however, is indicating possession, either singular or plural.

What amazes me is the tendency of some people, even those who have ambitions to be professional writers, to use an apostrophe incorrectly to indicate plurals. I've seen sentences such as "The boy's and the girl's were studying together." Is this mistake caused by ignorance or carelessness?

I've seen the error often enough to suspect that some people really do confuse plurals and possessives. When they see phrases such as "the boy's backpack," they see nothing wrong with writing "the boy's are back."

I sincerely hope this error is not one that becomes commonplace.

The Apostrophe: It’s Not Just for Decoration

It seems to me that people tend to toss apostrophes around as though these punctuation marks were intended solely for decorative purposes. I recently came across a sentence that read, “Do publishers and author’s really feel that.…” Why on earth would the writer make publishers plural (correctly) but throw in an unneeded apostrophe to make that second noun—author—both singular and possessive? Is there some convoluted logic in these instances, or do people have no idea what an apostrophe is used for?

Of course—and perhaps this is what confuses people—the apostrophe has many purposes other than making words possessive. It’s used in contractions as a replacement for letters (such as “it’s” for “it is”). It’s also used to guide us in correctly reading “minding our p’s and q’s.”

But these uses are fairly straightforward and don’t really seem to be an adequate reason for just tossing an apostrophe into a word when it has no purpose.

What about you? Have you seen instances recently of misused apostrophes? If so, I’d like to hear from you.