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This is a sentence I published last night, but rewrote this morning after seeing it with fresh eyes: (new version) “The world is a funny inter-connected kind of place when you’re sitting in a small town near Geneva, Switzerland and you see in the Los Angeles Times page for local animal-lovers that a couple of kangaroos have had a gooooood kissing and cuddling session in Basel.”

The original version was correct, but it didn’t look or feel right, and if it bothered me, it will bother other readers. Editing isn’t just a matter of getting the writing correct, but of making the reader comfortable. The goal is to make readers forget the grammar and spelling and punctuation so they can concentrate on the content.

Here is what I had earlier: The world is a funny inter-connected kind of place when you’re sitting in a small town near Geneva, Switzerland and you see in the Los Angeles Times for local animal-lovers page that a couple of kangaroos have had a gooooood kissing and cuddling session in Basel.

What was wrong with this sentence, grammatically? Nothing, although the more pedantic editors among us will argue for an apostrophe: Times‘ or Times’s, to show that the page belongs to the newspaper. The Times’ solution is considered wrong by some editors (I’m one of them) because it signifies that Times is plural, whereas logically we’re talking about a newspaper, so the use of singular is called for. But who has the time or energy for this kind of hair-splitting in an age where many people don’t know the difference between it’s and its?

Our house style, for an international audience, includes the more easily understood Times’s, but I avoid using this as much as possible because it weighs down the sentence. Writing for the web should be kept light because the eye does not scan the same way it does with paper. Web writing benefits from being as free as possible of eye-stopping commas, apostrophes, dashes and other grammar trappings, while respecting the need for enough of these for the writing to be clear.

Possession, and the use of an apostrophe to show it, is one of the most confusing bits of punctuation for many writers who otherwise feel they write clearly and have mastered grammar. Should we write the board of directors meeting or the board of directors’ meeting?

Relax: both are correct. The first solution is considered correct because you can make the argument that it is descriptive rather than a case of possession. Personally, I prefer the first one, but it has great potential for error, so if you’re a writer who is on unsteady ground here, keep that apostrophe.

Coming back to the LA Times and kangaroos, I think an argument can be made that the whole phrase is descriptive, although you can certainly argue that the page belongs to the LA Times. I don’t believe the page belongs to the animal-lovers, however: it is for them. They definitely don’t get an apostrophe, I’m afraid.

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