We all see people’s posts and tweets that can’t be bothered to spell out anything, sometimes making it almost impossible to read. Twice today, I saw where a simple apostrophe wouldn’t necessarily make the author look smarter, but would have kept them from looking dumb.

When you shorten a word, an apostrophe is supposed to go in the place of the missing letters, like y’all. Some truncated words are actually words themselves. The one that I mentioned in particular what the shortened version of because.

We all say it. In fact it is more likely to be said than because. The word would be `cause. The word cause is even pronounced differently, not to mention that it means something completely different. So, when I read a sentence with the word cause in it for because, it changes the meaning of the sentence and I am forced to reread it to “sort” it out.

One little apostrophe changes everything. Use it, please.