David Burrowes' Blog

A friend recently showed me the Apostrophe Abuse blog (http://apostrophe-abuse.blogspot.com/). It led me to realize that "apostrophe abuse" is just a usability problem in the design of our writing system. Isn't that an interesting way to think of it?

The misuse of the apostrophe character (using the possessive form "its" when one should use "it's" to indicate an abbreviation of "it is") is one of those small details which some people find very upsetting. The amount of unhappiness they feel in these cases invites me to ponder the human condition... our need for things to conform to our expectations and our frustration when they don't. But, that's a topic for a different blog.

Usually, when people criticise the abuse of the apostrophe, they seem to have the attitude that the abusers are somehow ignorant, uneducated, or just incompetent.

Perhaps they are.

Yet, as I read through this blog, I realized that this attitude sounds very similar to the attitude of some software creators: "That user isn't smart enough to use my software!" In the usability field, we see this kind of thing as a problem of the design of the technology, not of the users.

From this viewpoint, the misuse only indicates that there is a usability problem in the written language. If we were designing the language like we design software, someone would write in a report:

In our usability tests, 40% of the people put the apostrophe in the wrong place. When we explained the rules to them, they still got it wrong 10% of the time. Based on the quality metrics for this product, we recommend a redesign.

Indeed, the cause of this problem isn't especially difficult to figure out. Most of the time, you do mark possessives with an "'s". ("That is Sue's elephant", or "The designer's nightmare"). However, you don't mark pronouns in this way ("Jumbo is his elephant"). Exceptions to general rules are often (but not always!) invitations for people to make mistakes. So you might predict people would have problems with other pronouns (indeed, a9.com tells me 86,000 web pages have the wrong spelling for "hers". Google knows of 650K. So, the prediction seems supported). However, the problem with "its" is worse, because "it's" is correct in a different case. So, you've got a general rule with an exception to it, and a different rule which produces something which looks as if the general rule had been applied. These are very logical rules. But as is sometimes the case, what you can state simply with logic can't be applied by ordinary people in practice (we aren't logical beings, even though we pretend we are).

Note: The redesign of written English is left to an exercise for the reader (there are some interesting possible solutions. Share yours!). Unfortunately, the written language is like command line interfaces: once it has shipped, it is very very difficult to change it, so I don't know if we can implement any new designs very soon!

Anyway.

Recognizing this ordinary situation as a usability problem in the design of the writing system makes me realize that a certain amount of our time in school is spent teaching us to work around design flaws. For example, certainly the time spent memorizing English spelling must be an example of this. Perhaps the need to memorize mathematical formulas indicates a usability problem in that field. The years spent learning to play a violin must indicate something about the flaws in the design of that instrument (can you imagine buying a piece of software so difficult to use that it would take you years of practice and extensive tutoring to become proficient? Hmm. Maybe some Photoshop users feel they've done exactly that!)

Indeed, isn't it interesting how we celebrate people that are masters at working around some of these usability problems? (spelling bee champions and folks like Yoyo Ma come to mind). Perhaps life would be more boring, though, if there were no usability problems at all.