on another message board there is a woman who consistently misuses apostrophes. it’s very obvious that these aren’t typos; she just doesn’t understand how apostrophes are used:
she also puts an apostrophe in does (doe’s). i don’t want to berate or embarrass her, but i do feel that somebody should tell her.
how can i broach the subject nicely?
E-mail? Is there private messages on that board?
I’ve seen that way too many times. Sometimes I bring it up, if the person posting is also an asshole poster. However, I don’t make any mention if the person is pretty much a cool person…I can’t explain it. Live and let live unless you piss the fuck out of me, I guess.
I totally understand why you’d want to say something, though…I kind of wonder how people can constantly communicate on a message board, read everyday, see the correct spelling of words and the correct usage of apostrophes, etc., and *yet[i/] still continue to misspell and commit other grammatical crimes.
It totally baffles me, but then I think about dyslexia, and other things, and I pretty much decide to say nothing. 
This is more of an IMHO thread. I’ll move it for you.
Cajun Man - SDMB Moderator
I really don’t mean this as a criticism, but I find the idea of you responding to:
with:
to be completely hilarious.
There is no possible way for you to correct this woman’s grammar and punctuation without looking like a jerk.
Argh…bad coding…another reason why I usually say nothing to the person.
I like editing typos I make all the time on other boards since we have the option. Here, I am anal enough to proofread most of my posts. 
The problem, here, I believe is that message boards are so prevalent and so many people with bad writing skills (grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.) post to them that you can’t really use other people’s posts as guidelines for writing. Though I consider my self well-educated with reasonable writing skills, I still post with errors.
Worse yet, the superfluous apostrophe is becoming more ubiqutous (wow, my tongue hurts :p). I see them in newspaper advertisments all of the time. I think the internet is just another tool for the dumbing down of America.
And the type of people who make such careless mistakes are the least likely to infer a rule from other people’s postings.
Good, this thread isn’t about me.
One e-mail will not correct their inability to punctuate, so in essence you would be telling the poster that they need to go back to school. Your post will not be sufficient motivation to make them do that. I’d just bear with it until whenever they ask if their punctuation bothers people (it happens sometimes), and then let them know while they’re open to criticism.