There are  so I'll cut to the chase. Is it correct to have et al. with an apostrophe to indicate ownership?     Bloggs et al.'s paper was good. I am going to interpret Bloggs et   al.'s work. Bloggs et al.'s analysis of Morsov et al.'s study was   mediocre.
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I want to use the possessive noun form with et al. as in  et al.'s versus et al.
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I almost never even think about synonymization. Why? Maybe because the link is almost hidden on the bottom of the :  Can we please make that feature more prominent? Maybe put it on the review page. I am sure there are some  waiting to be voted on. Let's get the tag jungle organized.
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I'm writing one of my first academic papers and I'm not sure whether etc. is too informal. Should I use et cetera instead?
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Would this look natural:     StackExchange is a helluva site! I found out about this site at Facebook.    Or should we use the preposition on:     StackExchange is a helluva site! I found out about this site on Facebook.    Or are both okay?   (Inspired by a )
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Alice and Bob have co-authored a paper together. The contribution (data collection, analysis, writing) was 100% Alice and 0% Bob, except that the original idea was initiated during a conversation between Alice and Bob. Bob acknowledged several times in private that he did not contribute to the project, but he claimed co-authorship for the idea and Alice did not object to that. Alice spent almost an entire year working on the project. Bob spent less than a couple of hours in total. A manuscript with both names has already been circulated, submitted and rejected from one journal.  Bob is now trying to block the publication of the paper due to a personal conflict with Alice. In the meantime, Bob became envious of Alice's early successes and decided to do everything to slow down her career, even at the expense of his own publication record. Bob is already tenured and has no pressure to publish. Alice, by contrast, needs more publications for her forthcoming tenure review. Of course, Bob never explicitly refused to submit the paper. But instead of sending it to a prestigious outlet (where the paper would have a good shot) he insists that they send the manuscript to a non peer-reviewed and unknown journal, which would not help Alice's tenure case. Of course he makes no effort in trying to find an agreement, as he would be happy not to submit the paper at all. Clearly, his decisions are driven by spite and malevolence only and he takes great care into not writing anything incriminating for him.  Is there anything that Alice can do in that situation? Does she have to resign herself to never publishing the paper? What are the risks for her if she removes Bob's name without his agreement and submits the manuscript on her own?  PS: as a response to Captain Emacs' comment, Bob's only contribution was to say "why don't we study the causal effect of X on Y?" in an informal conversation. Alice did absolutely all the rest (literature review, design of the protocol, data collection, analysis, conference presentations, etc.). But there is no evidence of this, other than the fact that Bob would be unable to answer any question that goes into the detail of the paper.
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When reviewing suggested edits, I ran across . It took a post originally in French and Google Translated it to English. I approved it, as it gave the post a chance to survive, and it properly attributed that the post had been translated. It appears that two others did the same.  But should have I? It probably falls under a 'radical change', right?
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What's the grammar behind A'warring, from the lyrics of Symphony of Destruction by Megadeth? It's the first time I'm seeing the use of such apostrophe.
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In the sentence below, are the usages of apostrophes correct?     In research about parent stereotypes, the correlation between parents’ beliefs about their early elementary age children’s’ mathematics abilities and the children’s actual abilities increased as children aged.
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As  shows, we nearly always use the possessive form of personal pronouns for friend of mine/his/ours/etc.  But when it comes to actual names, we prefer  without the possessive apostrophe. That preference is even more marked with, say, . Not that I think the usage itself is particularly American - it's much the same with .  Personally, I find friend of him grates. In general I've no strong feelings either way as to whether it's friend of Peter or friend of Peter's (though I deplore the possessive in ), but in line with many others, I really don't like the possessive in relation to things like countries.  Why is this?   Edit: Noting an apparent "progression" (pronoun -> person -> nation) marked by reduction in use of the possessive, I checked at a finer "granularity". NGram shows that although it does occur,  virtually "flatlines" against friend of mine. But the bias reduces through of you, of us, and by the time I get to  it's much less extreme. There seems to be something "egocentric" about the double possessive.  Presumably when babies learn to speak, they soon notice that possessive pronouns, possessive apostrophes, and the word "of", all do the same job. Parents would correct a child who says "of mine's", but probably wouldn't even notice the same "redundancy" in "of Peter's". Younger speakers are unlikely to even be talking about something "of America's". Perhaps as we mature we tend to discard the "double possessive" for the more "distant" things that only adults are likely talk about, but we keep it for "closer" people because that's how we spoke when we were younger.  EDIT2 I note that I'm a great fan of him is vanishingly rare compared to ...fan of his, but with ...fan (of John) the double possessive occurs far less often than ...friend (of John's). Usage seems to be affected by the noun before "of" as well as the one after it. This is getting complicated...
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In the following is it better to use a possessive noun with an apostrophe or an attributive noun without an apostrophe?     The following list details the assumptions that have been made in   conjunction with the Dell Company’s staff.   Or      The following list details the assumptions that have been made in   conjunction with the Dell Company staff.   Assume Company is the name of a company, such as Dell.
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Over at stats.stackexchange we are having a minor kerfuffle over whether a title is using incorrect grammar. It has been edited and re-edited several times. It would be great to get some arbitration and a clear explanation.   The original title was "What questions is your data team hoping to answer?" which was edited to "What questions are your data team hoping to answer?", then edited back. See the question .
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has been edited by .   , see revisions 3 to 4.   Now what he did is totally inexplicable to me, as a matter of fact he destroyed the answer. The new version is neither syntactically valid nor does it make any sense.  Still, the edit got "peer-reviewed" and nodded off.  Is there any way to deal with these kinds of things, other than sighing heavily and rolling back the edit?  Rhetorical side question: Could this be a side-effect of people grinding for reviewer badges?
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In a recent Financial Times article (Yemen PM Escapes Assissnation), the apostrophe necessary to show possession was left out. I've seen colleagues do it as well. Isn't it supposed to be "Yemen's PM Escapes...?" Other times I've seen people write "Japan Minister of Finance tackles deflation..." or "India VP resigns..." I have noticed that in most of these cases, the omission of the apostrophe was right before a captilazed appellation (president, country, municipal, etc.) What's going on? Firm grammar rules stipulate that there be an apostrophe, yet there isn't one. If the FT does it, then there must be an exception (in journalism?) that I'm unaware of. Must there or must there not be an apostrophe?
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What is the correct form? Does context play a role?  Are there noticeable trends towards the awkward "noone" or is it just a by-product of careless orthography on the Internet?
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I am an editor editing a book review, and I'm not sure how to deal with this:    Serhii Bilokin’’s book    The author has chosen to transliterate with the apostrophe at the end of the name, but it looks very odd with the English possessive tacked on at the end. I know that  the the apostrophe in Ukrainian language/names changes the pronunciation of the surrounding letters, but that's about it, so I'm not sure how integral the apostrophe is to the name. (I've seen it transliterated with and without, so I assume there are multiple right ways, but I'd prefer to respect the author's choices.) I'm having a terrible time trying to find precedents to base my decisions on here. I assume the issue is extra-grammatical. Any insight is appreciated! This type of thing fascinates me, but it's also very confusing.
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My non-native English speaking friend just asked me: "Data is..." or "Data are..."?  I said both but that's because I've been desensitized from reading/writing both (especially from writing code and adding quick comments).  My question: Is it acceptable to utilize either for a university paper? Or is one safer than the other (when confronted with stickler professors)?    Related questions:
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Consider the brief passage:     "I love your work, but calling you 'the artist' {1} just doesn't seem to be   cutting it anymore. What shall I call you?"      "OK. Call me George." {2}   So my instincts tell me to put {1} in single quotes as opposed to no punctuation (or perhaps even italics) but to do the opposite for {2}. Is this right? Why?  Let me expand this one further iteration:     "Wow, that's a great name, especially with this crowd. Maybe for your next book    you should call yourself Ringo."{3}