Unpunctuated Challenge 11: Apostrophes

What’s missing?

The apostrophe probably attracts the most attention of all punctuation marks. It’s been around for 500 years or so and during that time people have used it in various ways including as an indicator of a missing sound in a word.

Today we use it to indicate a missing letter. In this case the missing letter is ‘i’ as the word it’s is a shortened form of it is.

You can find additional resources for using apostrophes for missing letters here.

The resource includes a folding sheet to help students understand the use of apostrophes for contractions.

You can find more quirky facts about punctuation in the Monster Punctuation book!