Grammar is tricky. Plain and simply put, it’s a difficult thing to conquer and understand, especially in the English language. For every rule you concoct, there are plenty of words ready and willing to steadfastly go against it. For every “i before e except after c”, you have plenty of seizes, weights, and ancients that glaringly disregard the rule.
One grammatical topic that tends to cause a good deal of distress is what to do with possessives. I mean, “Harry’s” dog is the dog that belongs to Harry, and the “dog’s” house is the little house-like shed outside where the dog sleeps. If you wanted to just use the pronoun “it” for the dog, though, “its” house is still the little house-like shed outside where the dog sleeps, but now it doesn’t have an apostrophe. What’s with that?
Plus, you have the whole “s” situation to deal with. One of the basic tenants of making words possessive in English (discounting situations like changing “she” to “her” and weird things like that) is the addition of an “s” on the end of the word. As we’ve seen, “Harry” becomes “Harry’s” and “it” becomes “its”. One has the apostrophe and one doesn’t, but they both share that newfound “s” at the end. The problem occurs with singular words that already end in “s”. Do you throw another “s” on the end or just leave it as it is?
It really is quiet an interesting question, and honestly, it’s one that doesn’t have a perfectly simple and singular answer. We’ll try our best, though.
The most painless answer around goes as follows: singular words which end in “s” can end in just an apostrophe or ‘s when showing possession. For example, the goldfish that Charles owns can be either “Charles’s goldfish” or “Charles’ goldfish”, and both would be legitimate and correct. Unfortunately, some other schools of thought on the situation aren’t as open and liberal about it. Some scholars believe that words ending with “s” (or even “z” or “x”) should generally omit the new “s” at the end and simply go with the apostrophe. An example: “James’ dragon”. Using this omission, you can avoid many awkward pronunciations, begin able to say “James dragon” instead of “Jamesiz dragon”, which can be a quite a mouthful. One avoidance of the additional “s” on the end that seems to be fairly common and accepted (regardless of what your preference is with most words) deals with ancient proper names. Achilles, Odysseus, and Jesus, for example, would all simply add only the apostrophe to become possessive. Is there a reason for that? Well, the best reasoning I could find is that the ‘s version of these words is a relatively modern convention (and possibly a minor corruption of English). That being the case, if you went back in time and were going to write those names in English, you’d be leaving off the “s” then, so why add it in now. Another situation to take the apostrophe only approach would be when the word already ends in “ss”. Words like “boss’s” and “dress’s” can look kind of clunky, so the additional “s” is usually left off.
Much like a great deal of other things in English grammar, this situation isn’t one with a simple answer that will always work. The best advice I can give you is to look at the word, say the word, and write down the word in whatever way makes the most sense in your mind. Most of the time, it will make the most sense to your reader too.
