Company names and possessive nouns
I was recently editing an essay for a business student when she used the phrase “McDonald’s marketing strategy.” I realized that the company name “McDonald’s” needed an apostrophe to show that the marketing strategy belonged to it, but it already had an apostrophe in the name. If the company name was “McDonald” then, the phrase “McDonald’s marketing strategy” would have been completely right, but I knew that I couldn’t change it to McDonald’s’ marketing strategy. So what could the solution be?
A quick search on the Internet showed me that many companies have dropped the apostrophe altogether, but McDonald’s is not among these. It would have been easy to write Barclays’ marketing strategy, but unfortunately, that’s not the kind of change an editor is allowed to make.
I thought of using the old editor’s trick of rearranging the sentence, making “the marketing strategy of McDonald’s” but it seemed too awkward. Finally, I turned to my partner, who chides me from time to time on my obsession with correct grammar. She asked me “WWGGD?” (What would Grammar Girl do?) I told her that I was seriously considering leaving a question on Grammar Girl’s website.
But she also, slyly, asked me to explain the problem to her. I told her that since McDonald’s already had an apostrophe in the business name, but the business name was being used as a possessive noun, the dilemma was how to structure a possessive noun as a possessive noun when it’s already a possessive noun. If this doesn’t make sense to you, then you are on the right track to the solution.
I realized that the reason that McDonald’s has a possessive format is that the actual name of the restaurant chain is McDonald’s Restaurants. When we say McDonald’s we are dropping the noun that is the complement of the possessive noun. And there was the solution: the phrase should be McDonald’s Restaurants’ marketing strategy.
So thanks Grammar Girl, your help was channeled through my beautiful and inspiring partner.
Problems of agreement: he or she vs they.
A reader asked for free grammar helpwith this sentence: When a professor gives a quiz, they often catch their students by surprise.
The problem with this sentence is not really in the sentence itself, it’s in the English language. The subject “a professor” is singular; therefore the pronoun in the dependent clause must be singular as well. But English doesn’t tell us the gender of the professor. The traditional way to write this sentence is to use “he” for the dependent clause, and have the verb in the third person singular:
When a professor gives a quiz, he often catches his students by surprise.
However, many people object to this on grounds of sexism, so they write the sentence as you have, using “they” in place of a third person gender neutral term. But strictly speaking, that is not correct, according to accepted rules of English.
The alternative is to write in all possibilities:
When a professor gives a quiz, he or she often catches his or her students by surprise.
That’s a bit of a mouthful, and this solution, when used in an essay, could result in a paragraph chock full of “he or she” and “his or her” expressions. That can’t possibly be good writing.
I usually try to rearrange the sentence to remove the sexist bias, the gender ambiguity, and the awkwardness.
Students are often caught unawares by professors’ quizzes.
However, this sentence could be criticized for being in the passive voice.
You could simply change the number of the subject:
When professors give a quiz, they often catch their students by surprise.
This allows us to maintain the gender ambiguity without mixing plural and singular.
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