The Vine: August 28, 2007
Dear Sars,
I am a book editor and have just been presented with an oddly punctuated subtitle. The subtitle has a city and state in it, and normally I would put commas after each of them. But the state is also a possessive, and I haven’t been able to find any guidance in Chicago 15th (our usual style guide) or another resource. To clarify, the subtitle is structured this way: “The History of Ogden, Utah’s, First Settlement” (not the real subtitle). At the moment, we have a comma after the state-apostrophe-s, but it looks bizarre to me. Do you have any advice?
Thanks very much,
Thomasina
Dear Tom,
The comma probably looks bizarre because it’s wrong. Imagine that you didn’t need the state as a modifier — that the city name is one that’s universally understood, like New York or Los Angeles. You’d render that as “The History of New York’s First Settlement,” right? A city-comma-state phrase should function the same way, so “The History of Ogden’s First Settlement” is correct, but “The History of Ogden’s, First Settlement” is not — and “The History of Ogden, Utah’s, First Settlement” is not for the same reason.
“The History of Ogden, Utah’s First Settlement” is indicated; use that.
Tags: grammar
