Teach Me Tuesday: The possessive apostrophe

I got lots of good comments (and even some requests!) last week, so I'm going to continue with this week's version of Teach Me Tuesday. Today we'll address the possessive apostrophe/when it is actually appropriate to use  's.

Maybe you're wondering about this sentence:
     Those are Jims candy bars.

Now hopefully last week you read about using s (without an apostrophe) to make things plural, so you know that "candy bars" is correct. [Sidenote: they taught me in editing school that "hopefully" is not actually a word---it should be written "with hope." That's a rule I choose to break.] Now you are wondering about putting an apostrophe in Jims.

One great trick to figuring out grammar is to turn the problem-sentence into a question. For example:
Do the candy bars belong to Jim? If the answer is yes, then use the apostrophe to indicate possession.
Correct:    Those are Jim's candy bars.

Now let's practice:
You're sending out your cute neighbor gift for Christmas. You want to sign it "Love, The Herrins."
You start to stress. You try: "Love, The Herrin's." You think about possession and convince yourself that possession is indicated because the love expressed does indeed belong to the Herrins. Yikes! That's tough! You may be tempted to even write: "Love, The Herrins's." I've seen it, folks! Well, dear Christmas card writer, your first impression was correct. When signing a letter or a card the plural is correct---no apostrophe here! You are simply indicating that more than one Herrin wishes the recipient love. Better yet, save yourself (especially if your name ends in s) and just sign it "Love, The Herrin Family."

One more:  If you were driving past my house and someone asked, "Whose house is that?" Your answer would be "It's Jackie Herrin's house."The house belongs to me, so I get the apostrophe with my name. (And you would use my first name because you really want to avoid saying "It's the Herrins's house.")

As always there is an exception to the rule. You may have seen them in the previous paragraph. Whenever the 's would indicate a word that is a contraction, then there isn't an 's. For example, "who's" could be mistaken for "who is," so "whose'" is actually a possessive word. Same with "it's" being mistaken for "it is," so "its" becomes possessive: "The dog put its foot in its bowl. It's a stupid dog."

And that's it! Not too bad, right? Stay tuned next week for the easy, easy answer to the who/whom dilemma. You'll love it---and you'll sound so smart!