Every so often, my mind recalls two memories of grammar from early primary school: how to spell the word favourite ("fav", "our", "ite", said aloud) [1], and how to use possessive nouns for names that end in "s". As someone whose forename ends with "s", learning how to use the possessive noun for my name was particularly important.
I learned that one would refer to (using an example I am making up right now, as I cannot recall the examples from the original lesson) a cup of coffee owned by James as "James' coffee". An apostrophe would appear after the "s" in my name. There would be no apostrophe "s", as would be the case for, say "Alex's car" or "Jane's car".
I recalled recently to a few people how that one lesson has stayed with me in my mind, vividly. I learned how to use possessive nouns before I had been consciously introduced to the phrase "possessive nouns". And thank goodness, might I had, given that spelling the word possessive is difficult. I tried at least twice before deferring to Google when I set out to write this post.
In my recent research, I learned that ending a posessive noun with an apostrophe and no "s" is part of the AP style guide. Not everyone writes this way. I can't say I am adhering to AP here: I'm practicing a lesson I was taught in primary school.
[^1]: This sentence reminded me of writing a tuple in Python, until I added the "said aloud" text.
Tagged in words.