Grammar lesson: using my years of experience
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In the course of answering a question on Twitter, I've just unintentionally taken part in a brief grammatical debate. Since I haven't covered anything grammatical for a while and I still need another blog for this month, I thought I'd explain my answer on here on the off chance it helps someone. The question was as follows:
"Dear grammar police, Is it "I have ten years experience" or "I have ten year's experience"? Thank you please."
The answer is neither. It should be:
"I have ten years' experience."
On its own, the term "years" implies multiple years. It does not denote any form of possession or belonging. In the example above, however, the experience belongs to the ten years. We're claiming the experience from those years as if it was a physical item in their possession. With only a handful of exceptions (explained below), we use an apostrophe and the letter S, followed by the thing our word possesses, to denote belonging. This is the case with our example, so straight away, we can rule out the term "years experience".
If we were dealing with just one year, we could say that the experience belongs to that year alone by saying "one year's experience". This is the singular possessive form. We achieve it by adding an apostrophe followed by the letter S after the word—in that order. In this way, we're suggesting that whatever follows our newly modified word belongs to the single thing that word represents and that thing alone.
We already know from the statement, however, that we're not just dealing with one year. We have ten of them and all of them have a claim to the experience being mentioned. That means we need to make the word "year" plural before we think about our apostrophe or our letter S. If you only have one year, you wouldn't need to pluralise the word. You could just say "one year" (or "a year" or "the year"). But if you have more than one year, you need to add an S to make it "years". In this example, we're talking about "ten years". Only once you've decided if you have one "year" or multiple "years" can you think about the possessive form.
So, we've decided we have "ten years". We now want to give those years some experience. Because the plural word already finishes with an S, what we can do is just add an apostrophe. If it was a plural word that didn't finish with an S (like "children"), we would add an S after the apostrophe. The word "years" (implying multiple years) already has an S, so we'll stick with just adding an apostrophe.
The result we get is "ten years' experience". We could have written "ten years of experience" or "experience of ten years" instead. Both would have implied the same thing without using a direct possessive approach. However, "ten years' experience" is much neater. When you think about it logically, the possessive plural isn't that hard, is it?
Just a few more points...
I mentioned above that there are some words for which you don't use an apostrophe (with or without an S) to denote possession. These include words like "it" (where the possessive is "its", as in "its experience", because "it's" always means either "it is" or "it has" depending on the context) and "who" (where the possessive is "whose", in "whose experience [is/was/has/etc.]", because "who's" always means "who is" or "who has"). As a rule of thumb, words that can be followed by the word "is" or "has" will become ‘contractions' of that phrase if an apostrophe and an S are added and not a possessive form.
There also are some other words, mostly pronouns, that use an entirely different spelling for the possessive form. Examples include "his" (possessive of "him"), "their" (possessive of "them"), "our" (possessive of "us") or "my" (possessive of "me").
I do understand why people get confused, but I hope this has helped nonetheless.