S Is for Story: A Writer's Alphabet (Alphabet Books (Sleeping Bear Press))

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S", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "ess," op. cit.

With proper nouns like Chris and James, you can choose either to use s’ or ‘s. The difference comes down to English style guides. When you follow the rules of The Associated Press Stylebook, Chris’ is proper. With all other style guides, Chris’s is correct. Ray Douglas Bradbury, American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and poet, was born August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. He graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. Although his formal education ended there, he became a "student of life," selling newspapers on L.A. street corners from 1938 to 1942, spending his nights in the public library and his days at the typewriter. He became a full-time writer in 1943, and contributed numerous short stories to periodicals before publishing a collection of them, Dark Carnival, in 1947.Technically these stories are great, perhaps not all Bradbury at his best but stories like Time in Thy Flight (about a school trip in a time machine), The Million-Year Picnic (a family escape Earth for Mars just before the atomic war breaks out) and The Smile (a boy is touched by art in a post-apocalyptic future) show Bradbury's talent in full swing but are also all, in their own way, somewhat dystopian. This also applies to nouns that look plural even though they’re singular in function (e.g., “politics’ importance,”“the United States’ foreign policy”) and to pluralized versions of names (e.g., “the Johnsons’ car”). Examples: Apostrophe after “s” for plural possessivesMy grandparents’ cat is not very friendly. If the explanation is a verb, use to, as in, “learning a language to communicate.” If the explanation is a noun, use for, as in, “learning a language for communication.” Grafton takes a different approach with this narrative, running two parallel story lines, one during 1953 when Violet disappeared and the second in 1987 as Kinsey works the case.

The reason we don’t use an apostrophe to show a possessive is long and complicated, but here are few fun facts: Greek: του (el) m or n ( tou ), της (el) f ( tis ), των (el) pl ( ton ) ( after the thing owned and before the owner )

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In most Western orthographies, the ſ gradually fell out of use during the second half of the 18th century, although it remained in occasional use into the 19th century.