Another apostrophe conundrum: Sydney Writers' Centre admits defeat 21/10/10

Here is the link to the Sydney Writers' Centre blog, in which they clarify how an apostrophe should be used. They have conceeded that my argument was correct.

I won't post their whole blog, but here are some interesting excerpts:

...So, back to the ‘Mens Room’. You’ll notice right away what’s wrong with our first two titles – the apostrophe is missing. It should be there, right before the ‘s’. The words ‘men’ and ‘women’ are plural already and therefore can’t be made more plural with the additional ‘s’. So why is there no apostrophe? Is it because the people making these signs don’t know it should be there? Is it laziness? Is it missing to save on ink, or just to make the sign look better? Whatever the reason, it is slowly becoming more acceptable to leave the apostrophe off in these cases.

Let me just clarify though, that I don’t agree it’s right to leave it off. It’s not. It’s completely wrong. There’s no such word as ‘mens’ or ‘womens’ or ‘childrens’. But I do think this is more about style than punctuation. Punctuation is there to make our meaning clear in writing. The apostrophe is indispensible in this but sadly, it is also one of the most neglected and misused punctuation marks, and this is probably why these erroneous style conventions have developed.

We’ve rightly been bought to task for our use of ‘Mens Room’ as an acceptable example in our newsletter tip yesterday... We really should have made it clear, though, that it’s considered OK only in a title and only as a style thing. It’s definitely NOT OK grammatically.

You can view the entire blog here: http://www.writingcoursesblog.com/2010/10/another-apostrophe-conundrum.html