Wrong Usages of Apostrophe in Medical Transcription

By Raj | Nov 18, 2008

“Customer’s Fortnight” This welcome message at the footsteps of my bank made me pause a minute to think “Who is this privileged customer to deserve a whole fortnight of transaction at bank?” Oh! I should have read it as “Customers’ Fortnight“. So the rest of the days of the year are dedicated to the bank staff then? (Don’t say that’s why Barclays Bank dropped apostrophe in their name to avoid this sort of apostrophe mess!)

Medical transcription career has made me a pedant that whenever I see inappropriate usage of apostrophe in classifieds or hoardings or shop signs, I’m getting irritated; truly it has become my pet peeve. When I see it misused in classifieds, particularly of any medical transcription company inviting transcriptionists, my opinion of that company plummets that I would think twice about applying for work at that company that advertises its lack of proofreading and grammatical skills!

Apostrophe concerns! Wrong usage of apostrophe in medical transcription.

People are so thoroughly confused with this crooked little mark that they are always putting in apostrophes where they don’t belong to or at times wherever they like! It is not even uncommon to see the “S” wrongly apostrophized even in verbs as in the mistaken “The patient complain’s a lot.”

To refresh what I have learned about the usages of apostrophe, I’m coming out here, rectify me if I am wrong:

There are only two main areas where one has to use apostrophe or remember about the usage of apostrophe, viz., contractions and possessives. Let me come out with some examples.

Contractions: Some letters are missing, and to denote that, one has to insert an apostrophe.

I’m
don’t
aren’t
haven’t
can’t

Possessives singular: Use an apostrophe plus S to show the possessive form of a singular noun:

John’s pen
My son’s shirt
Today’s weather
Diana’s husband

If the singular noun already ends in S:

Thomas’ bike
Harris’ pencil
Jesus’ views
Boss’ desk

Possessives Plural:

Girls’ school
Students’ restroom
Teachers’ dining area

This is what I have learnt as one of the basics in English grammar and I think the rules for both are simple and easy, that any trained MT can’t mess it up, but what when you see an apostrophe wrongly used in acronyms and plurals? At least I go wild.

Here are some commonest mistakes with acronyms that I used to come across while proofing transcribed documents:

RN’s
LPN’s
MRI’s
GTT’s
NSAID’s
WBC’s
ECG’s
CT’s
EMG’s
BP’s
RBC’s

And some of the wrong usages of apostrophe in plural form:

The doctor’s had a review.
Visitor’s were not allowed at that time.
Victim’s were rushed to the hospital.
Medical student’s gathered at the university.
The patient has a lot of complaint’s.

Again, there is a myth prevailing that one need to put an apostrophe in pluralizing those words that ends with a vowel:

Vaccine’s
Knive’s
Blade’s
Tomato’s
Potato’s

I could hear you asking what about those numbers? Here are a few:

1980′s
Pack of 20′s
The roaring 90′s

Had a good laugh with these bloopers? I have censored a lot and haven’t included many as they’re not worth publishing here but if you want to have a great time and a funny time with apostrophe, look at apostrophe abuse photographs, a real collection of bloopers that we come across in our daily life.

I could tolerate if one is putting an apostrophe in “She got two a’s and three i’s.” Without an apostrophe these two would have become “as” and “is” and hence can be considered as exceptional cases pluralizing lower case letters. Furthermore, I could assume the primordial urge in writers of shop signs to use apostrophe to denote plurals when you see “cucumber’s for sale” or “book’s at 30% discount” or “shoe’s on sale,” but what about us, medical language specialists? No spell checker is to going to point out that you’re wrong! So if you were having misconceptions about using apostrophe, update your infobank that whenever S is added to a word simply to make it a plural, no apostrophe is used.

Not satisfied with this plain solution? Posing a question to me about dos and don’ts and pros and cons? Refer what Washington State University says on dos and don’ts and pros and cons. Want more information about apostrophe? Refer detailed information on apostrophe usage at Wikipedia or a short description of apostrophe usage at Purdue University Online Writing Lab. Confident now with apostrophe usage?

Whenever I used to speak about the seriousness involved in medical transcription, I used to say that we medical transcriptionists are churning out legal documents, that a single misplaced punctuation can alter the meaning of a sentence totally; what the doctor intended might not be there in the document; yes, we should have to be pedants as lives may be at stake because of our mistakes.