What I have learned thus far

So far in this class I have learned many new things. In my writing I often use ‘however,’ and apparently did not know how to punctuate it properly. I would usually put ‘however’ in the middle of a sentence with a comma or semi-colon before ‘however’ and a comma following it. There are many different ways to punctuate ‘however’ as I soon found out. Yet another grammatical rule that I have learned is how to use punctuation to completely change the meaning of a phrase. I have always known that adding punctuation changes how words are spoken and how the meaning is altered. I did not know that just a few comma’s or ending punctuation could really alter a sentence meaning that completely.

Learning about apostrophes added whole new concepts to my grammatical understanding. I realized that apostrophes were used for contractions, such as in ‘it’s’ to replace ‘it is.’ I also knew that apostrophes were used to express possession as shown in the phrase ‘Charlie’s camel.’ These are the kind of uses that I thought apostrophes served. I had never though much about how they accomplished the things they did, or how I knew where to place them besides a gut feeling. In class I found that my gut feeling can be right sometimes, and wrong at other times. I now know how to spot a misuse of an apostrophe, at least when used in possession or conjunctions. Another thing I learned about apostrophes is the fact that they actually replace letters, and even in some cases words. However I do find myself confused with when to use ‘es’ instead of ‘s. Also I don’t quite understand the concept of eliminating letters. Does this mean that a writer can eliminate any amount of letters and replace them with an apostrophe as long as they can justify it?