Find the Error 12
(Extract adapted from a city council leaflet advertising a public museum)
What kind of mistake do you see? (Choose one:)
- apostrophes
- articles
- doesn't make sense
- punctuation
- singular / plural
- spelling
Answer: apostrophes
In this example, the owners of the museum need to sit down and have a long
think about what the name of their museum should be. In the title – 'Shaw's
House Museum' – they have used the apostrophe correctly: the 'House', or
even the 'House Museum', belong to 'Shaw' (whoever he or she is). But in
the address section the name of the museum is unceremoniously stripped of
its apostrophe to become plain old: 'Shaws House Museum'. Since
consistency is one of the hallmarks of good writing, the author would be better
off choosing one or the other of the two titles and sticking to it. I would favour
the first – 'Shaw's House Museum' – because it uses the possessive
apostrophe 's' in a grammatically correct way. We know that 'Shaw' is an
English surname, so we can guess that the name of the museum indicates
that the house (or the house museum) belongs to (or used to belong to) a
person named Shaw. In which case, the author needs to use the possessive
apostrophe 's'.
Click here to download this page as a free .PDF worksheet
|
