Apostrophy for possessive is OK. Iirc, it’s just uncommon on “it’s” solely to differentiate between “it is”. I know for a fact this is what I was taught in college and still have the English book. Some teachers and books written by those teachers pretend there never was a hard rule for possessive apostrophies.
For example, the AP styling guide says do not add an extra ‘s’ for singular possessive when the word already ends in s or z, but traditional English rules say do it.
Yeah, it gets complicated when formal rules can just be made up. I had a group of professors who published a little sheet saying, “These are the ways we like it, but unless it’s truly horrendous, you aren’t getting knocked for it.” Their rule was something along the lines of pre-Roman fall, names that ended in -s don’t get an extra ‘s, but afterwards they do. So Jesus’, but Aquinas’s… /shrug
Apostrophy for possessive is OK. Iirc, it’s just uncommon on “it’s” solely to differentiate between “it is”. I know for a fact this is what I was taught in college and still have the English book. Some teachers and books written by those teachers pretend there never was a hard rule for possessive apostrophies.
For example, the AP styling guide says do not add an extra ‘s’ for singular possessive when the word already ends in s or z, but traditional English rules say do it.
Yeah, it gets complicated when formal rules can just be made up. I had a group of professors who published a little sheet saying, “These are the ways we like it, but unless it’s truly horrendous, you aren’t getting knocked for it.” Their rule was something along the lines of pre-Roman fall, names that ended in -s don’t get an extra ‘s, but afterwards they do. So Jesus’, but Aquinas’s… /shrug
Let’s talk about the real issue, how do I make proper boundaries that are singular and possessive plural? Imagine a restauranted Pop’s. Is it Pop’ses?
Well, it’s obviously Pop’ses’s.
Is Pop’ses is the plural, the plural possessive would be Pop’ses’