Hey everyone,

Based on what I’m noticing in your assignments and forums, here’s a bonus learning
tip to help you work towards...

Being a better professional through better communication

Although this specific issue is a bugbear for me and it’s not the core focus of this
course, it is a critical cross skill for every professional knowledge worker. Grammar
Nazis, you’ll love this!

Never ever use apostrophe S for plurals. Not in words. Not in abbreviations.
Not in numbers.

See these examples – the incorrect pluralisation punctuation is struck out:

 BSA's is possessive. BSAs is a plural.

 Not CSR’s, but CSRs.
 Not do’s and don’ts. It’s dos and don’ts.
 Not pro’s and con’s; pros and cons.
 Not T’s & C’s. Ts & Cs (or T&Cs).
 Not braai’s. Use braais as the plural.
 1990’s != 1990s or ’90s.

In English, when pluralising a word, acronym or number, just add "s". The
apostrophe S indicates possession, not plural. (We also use an apostrophe to
indicate contractions of a word or joined words e.g. "don't" for “do not”, or “ ’90s” for
“1990s”).

The errant apostrophe when pluralising is an easy mistake, but it changes the
meaning of a word entirely. This takes time to fix mentally, slowing comprehension,
even if for only milliseconds. E.g. when I read “BSA’s” and there’s no noun after it,
then I wonder, “BSA’s what? This sentence is incomplete!”

BTW, did you notice how “Nazi” and “apostrophe” are pluralised above? Yep, no
apostrophe. 

(Related punctuation tips: two rules for initialisms (a type of abbreviation): 1. use all
caps e.g. "CRM", not "Crm" or “crm”. 2. both the plural S and possessive S are lower
case because they are not part of the acronym e.g. “BABOKs”, “BABOK’s”.)

So what? Why should we care?

In our work, there’s a lot of devil-in-the-details that affects our professionalism and
quality of work. As BAs and BSAs, we need to be good at both big picture, visionary
and systemic thinking, as well as in the details. Our communication skill plays a far
greater role in our work than we might realise.
On the face of it, neat diagrams and good spelling may seem pedantic. After all, in a
general communication context, spelling really isn’t as important as everything else
in how we get along.

But there are two key effects of careless language or sloppy drawings, especially in
our line of work as technical-knowledge workers:

1. The most obvious: it breaks our work e.g. imprecise or ambiguous

specifications.
2. It erodes our credibility and trust that we need others to have in our work.

I admit the errant apostrophe drives me batty, but I hope you can at least work with
this as a metaphor of how our personal effectiveness is enhanced or destroyed by
our language and diagrams.