There’s a phrase you’re bound to need to use when writing a CV, a bio for a proposal, or showing off in a World of Warcraft chat room, to prove how practised you (or your colleague/client/avatar) are.
But there you may pause (and you wouldn’t be the first). Is it year’s experience or years’ experience? You’re talking about experience belonging to years, so you know it needs an apostrophe somewhere. But where?
The simple answer is that it all depends on how much experience you actually have (easy now). If it’s one year, write year’s experience. If it’s multiple years, put years’ experience. The apostrophe (and additional s, if necessary) just attaches to the end of the appropriate word written in full – as if the ’[s] stood in for the word of:
I have one year of experience = I have one year’s experience
She has twelve years of experience = She has twelve years’ experience
And this rule applies in the same way whenever you refer to anything that ‘belongs’ to a period of time. Lynne Truss brings this point up (along, you imagine, with a delicate smattering of rabid froth) in her book Eats, Shoots & Leaves, where she bemoans the absence of an apostrophe in the film title Two Weeks Notice.
What the producers meant, of course, was Two Weeks’ Notice. Did they learn nothing from A Hard Day’s Night?
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[...] condensed into ‘600 years’ experience’, the apostrophe expresses this sense of possession. (Here’s a post that backs me up.)Another way to express it would be ‘600 years of experience’, but such a [...]
That sentence does not make years of sense!
condensed into 600 years(it’s sort of an indefinite time factor) experience…
Hi Hannah,
It’s not particularly clear that the comment above is a pingback from an article in which the writer links to our article above. The full version is here: http://www.abccopywriting.com/blog/2012/10/04/plain-english-patrol-4/
We agree with Tom about the possessive apostrophe in ’600 years’ experience’. (But then, we would!)
This is a stickler that catches me each time I write a CV or story.
If A belongs to B, then it is either A of B or B’s A. (notice the order of A and B in the two sentences)
Therefore, years’ experience is not the same as years of experience, because if so, then Agatha’s book would be the same as Agatha of book. The whole idea is wrong.
Here we are not talking about the possession of experience by year, say for example you say “years of boredom” or “years of hard work”, there is no possession here…
But your point on use of apostrophe is immaculate!
Hi Arvin
If you want to follow the A/B rule, you can translate it as ‘I have experience of one year’, rather than ‘I have one year of experience’. We didn’t use that example because it’s a fairly uncommon structure (as is ‘I have the book of Agatha’, of course).
You’re right that there’s no possessive relationship between years and experience (see Catie’s quote marks around ‘belongs’) – but for the sake of getting your apostrophes in the right places, it can be helpful to think as though there is.