Possessives are a funny thing. When used correctly, they add much-needed clarity to our sentences. But they seem to confound our apostrophe rules.
Let's sort out this grammar conundrum, shall we?
What's a Possessive?
Before we get into the tricky rules, let's cover the basics.
A possessive is a word or punctuation that indicates the relationship between two nouns.
Sometimes, this uses adjectives: my car, his ice cream cone, our chair, their cat, etc.
Sometimes, this uses pronouns: the car is mine, the ice cream cone is his, the chair is ours, the cat is theirs, etc.
And sometimes, it uses apostrophes: Bert‘s ice cream cone, Jenny‘s cat, etc.
So when do you use each one?
First and Second Person Possessives
I'm partial to first and second person possessives:
It's tearing up my heart when I'm with you.
If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends.
The boy is mine.
The main reason I enjoy them (besides their prevalence in pop hits of the late '90s) is that they're pretty straightforward. Mine, yours, ours. No messy apostrophes.
Just pick the adjective or pronoun that matches the speaker and fit it into the sentence. Adjectives go before the nouns:
my heart
Pronouns go after the nouns:
The boy is mine.
Easy peasy, right?
Apostrophes: Where Possessives Get Tricky
If first and second person usages are pretty straightforward, third person usage is where the fun begins.
Let's start with singular possessives.
Singular Possessives
If your subject of ownership is a singular noun, you can go ahead and add the apostrophe and s.
Hanson's “MMMBop” is the best song with a nonsense chorus.
It gets tricky when your subject ends with an s. If it's a singular subject, you still add the apostrophe and the extra s.
Britney Spears's career trajectory has been an interesting one to watch, but she has evolved into a captivating entertainer.
Plural Possessives
Moving on to plural subjects: always, always, always end the subject with an apostrophe only.
The Backstreet Boys' fan base is devoted and passionate, but I've always been an *NSYNC girl.
It doesn't matter what the object of possession is, or if it's one thing or many. The subject or owner is what you want to keep track of.
Whose Turn? Yours
Now it's your turn. Go, use your possessive adjectives, pronouns, and apostrophes with confidence. With these rules mastered, you'll clear up your readers' confusion and use possessives like a pro.
(Did you catch all my possessives in that paragraph?)
When do you run into possessive problems? Let me know in the comments.
PRACTICE
For today's exercise we're going to practice writing about ownership, paying close attention to apostrophes.
Here's the prompt: The assistant to a self-centered pop star (male or female) is cleaning up the star's hotel room. Describe their inner monologue as they work.
Write for fifteen minutes. Post your practice in the comments.
Have fun!
Ah Thank you! I always have trouble with words that end in “s” and apostrophes!
Oh you’re so welcome.
Ah Thank you! I always have trouble with words that end in “s” and apostrophes!
Oh you’re so welcome.
The view of the Strip was spectacular from the Presidential Suite’s balcony. But inside, the view was anything but spectacular. It was a total wreck. Johnny’s entourage had partied all night and then slept till noon. Now they were headed out for an afternoon of golf, leaving the clean up in Manuel’s capable hands.
“That must’ve been some party last night,” Manuel said out loud. He had been Johnny’s assistant for the past six years so he was hardly surprised by what he saw, but it still disgusted him. Manuel’s conservative upbringing made it difficult for him to accept his boss’s out-of-control lifestyle.
Empty bottles were scattered around the suite’s many rooms. The master bed’s headboard was cracked in two and the chandelier in the dining room had a pair of men’s underwear hanging from one of its ornate bobeches.
“I don’t believe those are Johnny’s size,” Manuel surmised. As he cleaned up around the bed room, he was relieved to see that he had at least used protection. Lots of protection. A whole 12-pack of protection. Manuel shook his head in disgust.
He made his way through the trash and headed for the balcony. He needed some air. As he watched the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Strip creep along, he counted at least 20 RVs between the hotel and Mr. Mathis’s theatre. He never thought he would see the day when his boss headlined in Branson.
He gathered his wits and went back inside. He carefully collected the 12 used Depends and ordered the hotel’s maid to take them directly to the dumpster.
Nice practice, Tom. Lots of great apostrophes, and filled with your token wry humor. He cracked the headboard? Impressive. And I had to look up “bobeches.” How do you even pronounce that? And the twist at the end? I had to re-read Depends two or three times to see if you did that on purpose. You did. Priceless. I’m impressed, Tom.
Thanks Joe. Just out of curiosity, do you know who Johnny Mathis is?
Ha I do now. Didn’t realize you were referencing a real person.
I confess I did not catch the twist, even after looking up ‘Depends’. Though I agree that it’s very well-written – I like how every word is put to use, with no excess or padding.
The view of the Strip was spectacular from the Presidential Suite’s balcony. But inside, the view was anything but spectacular. It was a total wreck. Johnny’s entourage had partied all night and then slept till noon. Now they were headed out for an afternoon of golf, leaving the clean up in Manuel’s capable hands.
“That must’ve been some party last night,” Manuel said out loud. He had been Johnny’s assistant for the past six years so he was hardly surprised by what he saw, but it still disgusted him. Manuel’s conservative upbringing made it difficult for him to accept his boss’s out-of-control lifestyle.
Empty bottles were scattered around the suite’s many rooms. The master bed’s headboard was cracked in two and the chandelier in the dining room had a pair of men’s underwear hanging from one of its ornate bobeches.
“I don’t believe those are Johnny’s size,” Manuel surmised. As he cleaned up around the bed room, he was relieved to see that he had at least used protection. Lots of protection. A whole 12-pack of protection. Manuel shook his head in disgust.
He made his way through the trash and headed for the balcony. He needed some air. As he watched the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Strip creep along, he counted at least 20 RVs between the hotel and Mr. Mathis’s theatre. He never thought he would see the day when his boss headlined in Branson.
He gathered his wits and went back inside. He carefully collected the 12 used Depends and ordered the hotel’s maid to take them directly to the dumpster.
Nice practice, Tom. Lots of great apostrophes, and filled with your token wry humor. He cracked the headboard? Impressive. And I had to look up “bobeches.” How do you even pronounce that? And the twist at the end? I had to re-read Depends two or three times to see if you did that on purpose. You did. Priceless. I’m impressed, Tom.
Thanks Joe. Just out of curiosity, do you know who Johnny Mathis is?
Ha I do now. Didn’t realize you were referencing a real person.
hi Liz, i love your shameless obsession with grammar! gives me courage to voice my fears and complaints. this post prompts me to bring two issues to you tonight:
1 ) Do you think that the contraction “you’re” is going to become a thing of the past (maybe it already has?). When i first started texting, i cringed but for speed would shorten it to “your”. now i feel nearly no guilt for going with “ur”. For the sake of the children…do you recommend that i stick with the grammar i grew up with, no matter how many extra key strokes it requires?
2) 9 out of 10 bloggers write “people that….” rather than “people who”. WHAT THE ??? what do i do with bloggers that don’t know an animate object from an inanimate one? (see what i mean, it’s everywhere.)
Thanks for your enlightenment on these grave areas of concern.
Thanks, Kati! I love that we provide a safe space for your grammar questions. On to your two points:
1. Oh dear. You have hit one of my biggest pet peeves about technology. As convenient as texting is, it definitely causes our grammar and spelling to suffer. I will always advocate for full words under any and all circumstances, unless you’re paying per text and really need to conserve keystrokes. Even then, I tend to sacrifice spaces or punctuation marks instead of letters. And I have a confession: whenever I get a text message from someone who abbreviates when they have plenty of characters to spare, I judge them for a half second. I know; it’s terrible. But I can promise that I’m not the only one.
2. You may have just inspired my grammar post for next week. 🙂
hi Liz, i love your shameless obsession with grammar! gives me courage to voice my fears and complaints. this post prompts me to bring two issues to you tonight:
1 ) Do you think that the contraction “you’re” is going to become a thing of the past (maybe it already has?). When i first started texting, i cringed but for speed would shorten it to “your”. now i feel nearly no guilt for going with “ur”. For the sake of the children…do you recommend that i stick with the grammar i grew up with, no matter how many extra key strokes it requires?
2) 9 out of 10 bloggers write “people that….” rather than “people who”. WHAT THE ??? what do i do with bloggers that don’t know an animate object from an inanimate one? (see what i mean, it’s everywhere.)
Thanks for your enlightenment on these grave areas of concern.
Thanks, Kati! I love that we provide a safe space for your grammar questions. On to your two points:
1. Oh dear. You have hit one of my biggest pet peeves about technology. As convenient as texting is, it definitely causes our grammar and spelling to suffer. I will always advocate for full words under any and all circumstances, unless you’re paying per text and really need to conserve keystrokes. Even then, I tend to sacrifice spaces or punctuation marks instead of letters. And I have a confession: whenever I get a text message from someone who abbreviates when they have plenty of characters to spare, I judge them for a half second. I know; it’s terrible. But I can promise that I’m not the only one.
2. You may have just inspired my grammar post for next week. 🙂
You crack me up! I love the writing assignment, and thanks for the lesson. Are you a card-carrying member of the APS? (That’s Apostrophe Protection Society)
You crack me up! I love the writing assignment, and thanks for the lesson. Are you a card-carrying member of the APS? (That’s Apostrophe Protection Society)
The door cricked open, and Emma said a silent prayer. She hoped Lily Summers’s room wasn’t as bad as she expected it to be. For safety’s sake, she pinched her nose when going in.
The room was dark: the thick curtains were closed. In this state, she could step on something, or someone. Emma tread upon the fluffy carpet, which never seemed to end, and fumbled for the curtains’ draws. Upon releasing her nose, a smell hit her. It wasn’t the worst she expected (that is, spoiled yoghurt), but a reek of perfume was nearly as bad.
Lily Summers had a taste for expensive and stinky things, ranging from perfume, to little dogs and to men. Back when they were friends, Emma could laugh at Lily’s stupid ideas. When Lily released her first hit record, Emma thought they were both going to live the dream. She expected at least a nice dress for her position as assistant.
But assistants were for sorting out abused hotel rooms in the same t-shirt and jeans they wore since they were fourteen. Today wasn’t the first day Emma had to do this. There had been other times, worse times. (Again, the spoiled yoghurt.) Emma felt sorry for the hotel staff, whose job was to head over to Lily’s bathroom and clean That Place. Though Emma was on a higher rank than them – or at least considered a human being of sorts – it still felt like Lily owned the place, owned them.
Emma buried her anger. What good would it do to rage against Lily? At least she gave Emma a job, albeit a crappy one.
She headed to the bed, where the sheets were tossed about and mounted into heaps.
How many people had slept here? Emma hoped there wouldn’t be the second-worst-possible-smell in the bed. She remembered the day when she discovered that scent, and rage from that time boiled up again. What was Lily thinking…
A chihuahua squirmed out of the bedsheets, and ran off. Another chihuahua followed. And another…
Emma felt a cold sweat. Dogs in the bedsheets. Something had gone wrong, terribly wrong.
She didn’t know what to expect when she pulled back the sheets.
She jumped back in disgust. It was bad, the worst, worse than spoiled yoghurt diarrhoea or a ten-person orgy.
Emma opened her mouth and the repressed fury inside her came out as a piercing scream. For her nostrils had discovered the smell of chihuahua droppings.
Jane eyed the living room section of the Beverly Hills suit. Black pants, a red bra, dark brown boots, cigarette buds, some powder that might explain why she’s still asleep, and empty alcohol bottles covered the olive green couch. How can someone so glamorous be so dirty? If her fans saw this side of her, would they still adore her? She wondered. But aren’t we all in a constant state of performance. We pretend everyday to be the best polished images of ourselves. We select what we want to show the world on snap chat, on Facebook, and on twitter. We edit our sentences, we Photoshop our pictures until they are no longer recognizable. We pretend to be someone else, everyday, seven days a week. So are these stars any different than us? The only difference is that we are performing in hopes to gain more followers, aspiring to become famous. But they have the mansions, the boat, the entourage and they are still prisoners in this world of deception. She picked up her phone and deactivated all her social media accounts.
I liked your observations on performance and deception. That even the rich and famous are still caught in this web. Found the last sentence abrupt, though. It doesn’t flow from what came previously.
Many thanks for your feedback. You’re right, the end is very abruptive. I guess I ran out of time and felt I had to finish it somehow hehe
That’s happened to me before too! When 15 minutes is up and you don’t know how to wrap up. Haha.
😉
In the example given above, would Back Street Boys be considered singular or plural? The Backstreet Boys is a single band, but there are several “boys.” Sometimes, I think, this is the root of some apostrophe problems.
I thought the same thing. “The Back Street Boys’s music is not my cup of tea.” Also, I believe both “Britney Spears’s career” and “Britney Spears’ career” are both correct. Also, the advice, “Always, always, always end the subject with an apostrophe only” doesn’t seem right for plural nouns. “Babymetal’s music is more to my liking.” Isn’t that correct? Honestly, I’m experiencing The Mandela Effect with regards to my elementary education.
Ms. Becky has been my client for 5 years, we’ve been though a lot together, but it just looked like she was going off the deep end last night…We were in this hotel, and she thought that it was too boring to stay in her room, so she left without telling me…I was in the bathroom shaving off my five ‘o clock shadow & after I left the bathroom, I saw the whole room in disarray…her many bras hanging on the ceiling fan, her panties’ left strewed across the floor, lipstick smeared on the window. From what it looked like, she wrote her phone number on the windows overlooking the Denver metropolitan area..I worked with a lot of singers & actors/actresses, but I never worked with a lady so….unique…in the worst way possible.
I started out grabbing her bras from the fan, and I nearly killed myself as some of them was really hard to take off…Then I was off to pick up her panties from the floor…some of them were used, I remember picking up the first used pantie & throwing them back down due to my disgust & horror, I think I said to myself, “No, no, no……” As I pointed to the panties, after a few seconds, I slowly calmed myself down to the point of me just saying to myself, “I better get something in exchange of this….” I picked up each undergarment that she had on the floor and placed it in a spot where I would bunch them up after I was done. Then I focused on the bras, since I was 5”10, I had to jump and move each bra on the fan off of it and after I got the bras & panties, I went to the laundry room to wash them. An hour or two after I was done washing the articles of clothing, I walked back upstairs and put them back in the drawers. I lastly focused on the lipstick smeared across the window…*Sigh* I didn’t know how to remove lipstick, so…I looked up on the internet, and I came across a Yahoo Answers page that said to just use make-up remover that wasn’t the oily kind or astringent, whatever that is…So, I just went to the store, bought some make-up remover that wasn’t the oily kind or had astringent in it & just removed the mess she made.
When she came back to her room, she saw me, asleep and snoring up a blue storm, “Where are my bras?” she said in a drunken slur, I woke up and immediately stood up and said, “Becky, I cleaned up after you…the least you could do is show me even the littlest bit of gratitude…” She looked closely in the room to find that everything was cleaned up. “You really broke your back trying to clean this room for me…” She said, “Ya-think!” I kinda yelled at her. “You even washed my clothes, how could I ever deserve a assistant like you?” She said, she then hugged me, while I wasn’t returning the action…it was a long night…I was kinda ticked at her…
Vivid picture of how messy Becky is. The Yahoo Answers bit felt very real. Not sure about the use of these apostrophes though – “five ‘o clock shadow”, “her panties’ left strewed”. Should be “five o’ clock” and no apostrophe for “panties”.
Ok, I wasn’t too sure if I should’ve placed an apostrophe after panties, but thanks though!
This explains possessives really clearly.
Thiugh, I’ve been taught that names like Spears and James become Spears’ and James’ (e.g. James’ bike and not James’s bike)
That’s what I thought as well. Unless it’s for plural possessives only, which would make sense (there is a kind of logic :-))
I think I’ve got this one down. Thanks!
Here I go again. Cleaning duty for old Whatshisname. Non-disclosure agreement, I’m not supposed to tell you who I work for. Let’s call him the Jabberwock. Loved that nonsense poem back in school – you know, from “Through The Looking Glass”? “The Jabberwock with eyes of flame” – something something something – “and burbled as it came!” Yeah. “Jabberwock” is a perfect description for my boss. The eyes of flame, and the burbling. But hey, if people pay to hear him burble, then burble on, I say.
And me? I’m the Assistant Mayor Bellwether to his Mayor Lionheart. The Robin to his Batman. The Bucky to his Captain America. Why are the assistants always losers, if not outright evil?
I’m lucky enough to work for a fairly organized guy. Most of these stars, they might know a thing or two about music but whatever they have there is taken from their knowledge on how to keep things neat. My friends who’ve cleaned up after – oh, I won’t mention names but you’d recognize them, trust me – have told me enough horror stories.
But Jabberwock, he’s not too slobby to make my life difficult, but not too neat so as to border on OCD. He’s just the right amount of slob, if that makes any sense. Cleaning up after him isn’t hard. It’s just tedious as heck. After the 2,578th time or so.
Here we go. Start with the bed first. Whip off the covers and sheets, shake them hard, check he didn’t leave anything between the sheets. Usually nothing, but it’s amazing how his stuff gets a life of its own after two weeks’ worth of back-to-back concerts. Collect whatever’s been shaken out from the floor. Check and hoover in cupboards, look behind wardrobe, make sure that none of Jabberwock’s precious cosmetics or contact lenses are hiding behind the mirror. Those eyes of flame won’t take care of themselves, after all.
(Edit: Oops, this was supposed to be about possessives and I forgot to use them consciously.)
Thanks for the help with English. One gets rusty, and multi-linguistic types get their languages crossed, often. Did you get my latest book???? Alchemist 13
https://www.amazon.com/Alchemist-13-Lee-H-Andersen-ebook/dp/B01HIX8L8Y/