Before I begin, let me first start off with an important disclaimer. Just like everybody else, we here in the word trade dont claim to be perfect. There are time's when I come remarkably close, but even I make no claim's to perfection.

There are occation's when our publication has error's — both in print and online — and we have some loyal reader's who occationally point them our to us. We alway's appreciate those who help keep us on our toe's.

Having said that (or, to be more precise, having written that), let me expres's my concern about what I feel seem's to be a growing epidemic in the United State's — apostrophe abuse.

That humble little piece of punctuation has undergone quite a beating lately. Apparently there are quite a few folk's who think that the proper way to make a word plural is to interject an apostrophe before the "s."

If you look around the various place's you find yourself when youre out in public, you may find example's of this error more often than you might expect. If you werent aware of it already, youd probably be surprised at how often you see it.

Maybe people like myself are more sensitive toward it because we work in a busines's where we have to be as gramatically accurate as possible. I realize its not the kind of thing some people would lose too much sleep over.

Nonetheless, I would urge all of our educator's out there to put an emphasis on making sure their student's understand how to properly use that poor, misunderstood apostrophe.