Plural and Possessive Ss

English is a challenging language for so many reasons. Admittedly, one of those reasons has to be the confusing and complicated rules about Ss (esses). Third person present tense verbs end with s: has, wants, goes, shops. Plural nouns, more than one something, end with s: shoes, books, tables, hats. And most possessive nouns get an s, usually accompanied by a silent apostrophe, to indicate ownership:  car’s wheels, shop’s door, refrigerator’s light, phone’s ring. Finally, we often add an apostrophe s to words to contract a subject and the most common verb “is”: he’s going to be there; she’s looking for her mittens; what’s for dinner?

 

Spoken out loud, all of these Ss sound the same, but when we write them down, we realize that they are not. Each s tells us something different about the way the word is working with the words around it. In speech, we have the speaker’s inflection to guide us to the meaning, but in writing the wrong spelling of a word can throw us off since we don’t have the aural cues to guide us to the correct meaning.

 

In helping professionals work on their writing, mistakes with the plural and possessive s are often the most complained about, perhaps because most people can identify the problem and notice the mistake as a sign of carelessness or lack of education. In any event, working to use plural and possessive Ss correctly can only improve your credibility.

 

If you mean more than one, then you are using the plural s. In that case, just add an s to the end of the word.

If you mean that something belongs to something else, then add an apostrophe s to the end of the word.

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What messes most people up is the plural possessive: authors’ books, doctors’ appointments, computers’ hard drives. If you mean that more than one thing owns something else, then you need to add the plural s and follow that with an apostrophe to show the possession.

 

Just to confuse us, “its” is a possessive word that doesn’t get an apostrophe. It operates like hers, his, yours, theirs. These words are possessive pronouns, so they don’t need an apostrophe s since the only appearance of the word with an s is in this form. Instead “it’s” with an apostrophe is like she’s, he’s, what’s: a contraction of “it is.”

 

Problems with plural and possessive Ss happen to most of us because all of these Ss sound the same in our heads. But when you are revising your messages, go back and check your plural and possessive Ss, especially those tricky its and it’s to make sure that you are sending the best version of your message to your audience.

“The most memorable lesson is to use a comma in “Good afternoon, team” vs “Good afternoon team”. The second most useful lesson is to use a comma in front of “and” when making a list such as, 1, 2, and 3, unless 2 and 3 are supposed to be combined. These are the most useful because they are the two biggest mistakes I have been making and didn’t even realize it. I would recommend further classes be offered to our organization.”

— Employee at CDLE

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