As a proofreader, you risk your livelihood and your clients’ reputation if you follow the mantra “Style guide be damned.” As for the milk examples, they do not make sense to me with or without apostrophes. Please comment again if I have misunderstood your intent.Thank you Lynn! This is a possessive form, and the apostrophe is required.Take what you find helpful here, and ignore the rest. "Many people don't like the "years' experience" construction, and I don't blame them. You can bear a child, bear a responsibility, ask someone to bear with you, bear a heavy load or bare your teeth. Thanks for clearing this up, now I get it! Years here if the plural form of year and not some semantically improbable possessive.Hi, Percy. It is not clear to me what you are describing as wrong. I’ve read many a CV from a writer or editor claiming to have “ten years experience”. It was a wonderful three-year experience". I had written years’ experience and decided to scour the web to confirm if I was correct. There was a time when everyone would ridicule a person for saying the world was round too, so suggesting that someone is wrong simply because others don’t understand or agree is not a compelling argument either. Living things and time are the only 2 possessives that can use apostrophes. Following the current rules of writing helps us communicate clearly with our readers. Is it The simple answer is that it all depends on how much experience you actually have (easy now). “Ten years of experience” is a far better construction.Hello, Charlesas. It is the books and writers who need to evolve/change.

Do you know of any respected reference books that agree with your view? Devon, I support your choice. The examples of correct usage I gave above are all supported by respected, current style guides.It seems to me that “He owes me a week’s pay” and “I have ten years’ experience” are two different constructions, and the correctness of the former isn’t a useful guide when considering the latter.“A week’s pay” is the pay deriving _from_ a week of work. When you are editing us Yanks, though, be sure to let us keep the period (full stop) inside the closing quotation marks!I wonder what is the correct blogging etiquette?

It's odd. I am drafting several personal resumés’ and this really cleared up the issue of how many years’ experience I have. !Jim, I am sorry you missed this sentence from my post above, along with the many examples that illustrate it:“But why use the apostrophe? © Copyright 2005 - Present | Critic Capital LLC | All Rights Reserved It will probably be a long time before I change “two years’ time” to “two years time.” The main reason for the delay is that making that change would require making many related changes in possessive forms. The fact that you have some books that say to do it a certain way is not a sufficient refutation to their valid points. I do it because they are standards, and I would not succeed professionally if I disregarded them. The years are not the subject of the clause. -I have 5 years of experience in playing chess. I started teaching this stuff in 1983, and the rule has never even wavered from that time until now, according to all my style guides. I used the closed form “email” in my writing before any style manual did–because I knew the change was coming, and I was impatient. Proper communication is more than a set of dogmatic rules and I find it humorous when people cite the opinions of style books as universal and absolute truth.Hi, Kevin. It will take you to the blogs posts I have written about hyphens. If it’s one year, write And this rule applies in the same way whenever you refer to anything that ‘belongs’ to a period of time. The ticket-taker ridiculed my “Hi” as a stupid American greeting. Call it writer’s block. What is readable and sounds right is and should be the rule.Otherwise mankind and languages would be stuck in the past. Let me apologise on his behalf! If it’s one year, write year’s experience. When they can cite no expert who agrees with them, yes, they stand alone, perhaps like the first person who argued that the world was round. thanks so much for this….we just had a serious brain freeze in the office here…lol“as teacher for a period of over 10 years” is it correct ?can we say “over 10 years” like “been a teacher “for 10 years”?Hi, Robin. Style guide be damned. It's debatable. At the same time, I find myself sometimes avoiding “Hi” when I write to “English” speakers. I am glad you found my explanation helpful.I have written quite a bit about hyphens on this blog.

It is “five years of experience“ with no apostrophe. As Percy remarks, the experience does not belong to the years, it belongs to the person who has it. Here's one controversial sentence involving the use of the apostrophe:The position requires at least five years experience in web site development.The sentence needed to be tossed into the "s apostrophe" basket because the correct rendering is "five years' experience. It has become acceptable to write “The house’s location is a selling point” and “The problem’s size is a factor.” Although traditionalists may not allow such sentences, they are commonly accepted.

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