NEW -- Webinar July 29

ProofreadNOW co-hosts Webinar about Lead Nurturing!

ProofreadNOW’s director of sales and marketing, Conni Eversull, will co-host a HubSpot webinar about lead nurturing on Thursday, July 29, at 12:00 noon ET. If you’d like to learn how inbound marketing and lead nurturing can help grow your business, please join us. Click here to register for this webinar.

Free Download

Call for Blog Articles

Want to share your experiences, advice, or ideas with the GrammarPhile community? Do you have grammar, punctuation, editing questions you'd like answered? Submit guest post ideas or questions to conni@proofreadnow.com.

The GrammarPhile Blog

Current Articles | RSS Feed RSS Feed

More on Possessives

Posted by Phil Jamieson on Tue, Mar 09, 2010 @ 04:00 AM
  | Share on Twitter Twitter | Submit to Digg digg it |  Add to delicious  delicious |  Share on LinkedIn LinkedIn |  Share On Technorati Technorati | Submit to Reddit reddit 

A few weeks ago, we posted an article about use of possessives with singular nouns. Here is some more advice about using possessives when dealing with brand or company names.

The names of many organizations and products contain words that could be considered either possessive or descriptive terms.

As a rule, use an apostrophe if the term is a singular possessive noun or an irregular plural noun.

  • McDonald's
  • McCall's
  • Harper's Bazaar
  • Women's Wear Daily
  • Children's Hospital
  • Levi's jeans
  • Macy's
  • Reese's Pieces

Do not use an apostrophe if the term is a regular plural.

  • American Bankers Association
  • Chemical Workers Union
  • U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
  • Ladies' Home Journal
  • Reader's Digest
  • Government Employees Insurance Company

In all cases, follow the organization's preference when known.

  • Investor's Management Services, Inc.
  • Lay's potato chips
  • Folger's coffee
  • Diners Club membership
  • Thomas' English muffins
  • Mrs. Paul's frozen foods
  • Mrs. Fields cookies
  • Taster's Choice
  • Bakers Choice
  • Lands' End catalog

When adding the sign of the possessive to a phrase that must be italicized or underlined, do not italicize or underline the possessive ending.

  • Gone With The Wind's main characters
  • The Wind in the Willows' author  

Source: The Gregg Reference Manual

Tags: 

Comments

Oops -- Folgers has no apostrophe. (Interesting history on their Web site.)  
 
Sometimes I have trouble deciding if something is possessive or descriptive. How about a post clarifying that?
Posted @ Tuesday, March 09, 2010 11:50 AM by Merilyn Vaughn
Thanks, Merilyn, for that citation on Folgers. Interestingly, they used to have the apostrophe, and I am not sure when it was removed. You can see older coffee cans at ebay with the apostrophe. Perhaps Procter & Gamble removed it recently. Meanwhile... the question is, is the word possessive or attributive? The Chicago Manual has Diners Club, Department of Veterans Affairs and a housewares sale. CMS says don't use an apostrophe where there is clearly no possessive meaning.
Posted @ Tuesday, March 09, 2010 3:09 PM by Phil Jamieson
Phil - thanks for an interesting and useful post. All my years of writing and I was not aware of the rule about not underlining the possessive ending with a phrase or title that is italicized. Gracias!
Posted @ Tuesday, March 09, 2010 4:57 PM by Christel Hall
Comments have been closed for this article.

Subscribe by Email

Your email:

Follow Us

Posts by popularity

Posts by category