Rotten Writing

There are some common errors that professional writers really should not make; yet they do.

Try to imagine the horror of a professional writer who submits an error-free piece to a reputable newspaper, only to have errors inserted. It was kind of them, but really, we preferred the correct version.

As we explained on the previous page, apostrophes are used to denote possession, e.g. the postman's bag, the artist's brush, and so on. There is one exception to this rule, however, as there always is. If the word in question ends in a 's', the 's' after the apostrophe isn't used. Only the apostrophe is. So no, it's not the lioness's cubs, the actress's Oscar or the princess's pony. This is incorrect. It's the lioness' cubs, the actress' Oscar and the princess' pony.

This also applies to plural possessives, e.g. the lionesses' cubs, the actresses' Oscars, the princesses' ponies, indicating that there is more than one of them. So no, it's not 'the lionesses's cubs'. That's just silly. Interestingly, MS Word will pick up this error, so why do some people ignore that bright red underline? Maybe they don't know what it means.

It's a sad reflection of the lack of decent education in this country that people who work at the newspapers, whose job it is to write, don't know the basics. What's even sadder is that other people pick up these mistakes, thinking that if it's printed in a newspaper, it must be correct. It's not. Trust us.

At Write Way Freelancers, you won’t find any grammatical or punctuation errors, because we write it right.

Writing wrongs