By Cheryl Rushing

On Saturday morning I attended my first meeting of the Gulf Coast Writers Association.  I’ve heard about this organization from other writers that I trust, and the meeting did not disappoint.  In fact, I’ll be joining the group at the next meeting.

Along with old business and new business, they have a speaker, and this week, at least, a lesson.  The lesson was on apostrophes.

There was an editor at the meeting, and she proposed the question to the group (which was about 60 total) asking where would you put the apostrophe in this sentence:

“The food festival was made up of some of the area’s finest restaurants.”

Now, I have put the apostrophe in the proper place, after area, which indicates possession.  The finest restaurants belong to the area, so the area possesses them. 

I was amazed at how many people wanted to argue for no apostrophe.  Professional writers, even!

I am a stickler for punctuation, and I really enjoyed the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. It’s a fun and somewhat snooty look at common punctuational errors and their correct usages.

Highly recommended! 

I’m always on the lookout for writing opportunities, and one of the ways I do that is by keeping track of the RSS feeds of searches for certain sites, including craigslist.  I haven’t found anything viable yet, but hope springs eternal.

Anyway, the following two items popped up in my search feed sometime over the weekend and I had a little bit of a chuckle:

I am a writer and need a job (redacted)
hey im 16 years of age and i am a writer, its been my passion since i could draw little story using my crayons and paper. im about to start publishing my book of potery and i have worked for the school newspaper. but i need a more reliable job. so if there is a job out there that could suit my writing ablilitys let me know.

RE: I Am A Writer (redacted)
DUDE!!! 
STAY IN SCHOOL AND WORK ON YOUR GRAMMAR AND SPELLING. BOOK OF POTERY?

Now, I didn’t post the reply, though when I see things like this I often wish that I had the nerve.  If I did, I wouldn’t be quite so in-your-face or ALL IN CAPS.  I would probably send this kid an e-mail.

A few weeks ago I was looking at some postings on a freelance job board, and there was someone looking for copyediting work and his/her profile drove me nuts.  So much misspelling, so much improper grammar.  My guess is the jobseeker was not a native English speaker.

If you want to be a writer, your best friends should be spellcheck and a good editor BEFORE you hit publish.