Unconventional Contractions

Apostrophes’ main use is for contractions, I think. More on that later.

Apostrophes are also used for quotes inside quotes; in fact, the rule is you alternate single and double quotes as you nest them.

The student told me, “Our teacher said ‘Don’t use the fire escape until I say “GO!”.’.”

Technically you don’t need spaces between the marks when they fall together, but I would have used them because I want you to be able to see clearly what I’m doing. But I lucked out because I need a period for each sentence.

Another use for apostrophes is to show possession. Technically that is also a contraction; the possessive used to be “-es,” and we took out the “e” and replaced it with an apostrophe.

Contractions. Perhaps the most common contraction is n’t for not, but you can use it to shorten verb forms, such as the present perfect: “could’ve” instead of “could have.” You can shorten the future, too: “we’ll” instead of “we will.”

Then sometimes jargon shortens words, and the correct way to show the shortening is with apostrophes, hence this Frazz:

And I ran into this verb-form shortening with an uncommon, but perfectly correct contraction, brothers’ve:

Here are two rules:

In formal writing, avoid most contractions. Don’t use them unless they improve the writing.
Nowadays, most of the time, the –n’t contraction is okay to use.