The apos­tro­phe has two func­tions we all re­mem­ber from sixth-grade Eng­lish class.

1. An apos­tro­phe in­di­cates the pos­ses­sive case (Jes­sica’s bagel).

2. In con­trac­tions, an apos­tro­phe takes the place of let­ters or num­bers that have been re­moved (is not be­comes isn’t, Patent No. 5,269,211 be­comes ’211).

Apos­tro­phes al­ways point down­ward. If the smart-quote fea­ture of your writ­ing sys­tem is ac­ti­vated (see straight and curly quotes), you type an apos­tro­phe with the same key you use to type a straight sin­gle quote ('). Your word proces­sor will con­vert this char­ac­ter to a curly apos­tro­phe (’). Or you can type an apos­tro­phe di­rectly, us­ing the same key as a clos­ing sin­gle quote.

Text im­ported from a plain-text source (e.g., a web page or email ) may not have its apos­tro­phes con­verted to curly apos­tro­phes. To fix this, use the search-and-re­place tech­nique in straight and curly quotes.

Wrin­kles arise when an apos­tro­phe is used at the be­gin­ning of a word (again, as­sum­ing your smart-quote con­ver­sion is on). If you type the phrase:

This will be dis­played as:

The prob­lem here is that the char­ac­ters in front of 70s and n’ aren’t apos­tro­phes—they’re open­ing sin­gle quotes. They point up­ward. What you need is an apos­tro­phe in place of each se­quence of omit­ted let­ters, so the re­sult looks like this:

To get this re­sult, you have two choices. You can man­u­ally delete the in­cor­rect marks and type apos­tro­phes di­rectly (us­ing the key com­bi­na­tions above). Or you can type two sin­gle quotes:

These will be dis­played as:

Then you can delete the un­needed open­ing sin­gle quotes: