• MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • PopMyCop@iusearchlinux.fyi
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      10 months ago

      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