Hello,
Could you tell me about the difference between them?
***** NOT A TEACHER *****
Hello,
No need to be embarrassed. I have been speaking only English for three-quarters of a century, and I still understand only a
fraction of this magnificent language.
In England, there is a newspaper called the
Daily Mail. Millions of people love it, and millions, well, do not love it. In a recent
article, it claimed that 50% of teachers could not punctuate this sentence correctly:
"The Smiths
' house is a disused windmill."
(It did not tell us what the teachers "accidently" wrote. I
guess they wrote
Smith's.)
*****
If you are going to visit the house of Mr.
and Mrs. Smith
and their 3 children, you are, then, going to the house of the
Smith
s. Therefore, you are going to the
Smiths' house.
If you are going to visit the house of [Tom] Smith, you are, then, going to the house of [Tom]
Smith. Therefore, you
are going to [Tom]
Smith's house.
James
P.S. The article is on Google. Just type "Half of teachers make simple apostrophe mistakes."