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Possessive apostrophe for song title ending in a exclamation and in quotes

English Language & Usage Asked by Kesh St Hewind on September 6, 2020

I’m subbing a piece a of writing that contains the following sentence.

‘Press Heavenwards!’ exclamation mark gives away a Godspeed influence.

‘Press Heavenwards!’ is a song title that includes an exclamation mark. In our publication song titles are distinguished by single quote marks. Obviously the possessive case of the song title is being used, but how to signify it?

3 Answers

Setting the title in italics, which is not unusual, would solve the problem:

Press Heavenwards!’s exclamation mark gives away a Godspeed influence.

If setting in italics is not an option, perhaps because of your house style, then the quotation marks collide with the necessary apostrophe, as you've noted. It’s also likely that that sentence would be pronounced as heavenwards’ rather than heavenwards’s, which causes its own difficulties in adding ’s to the title.

One solution is to recast the sentence in order not to use the Saxon genitive:

The exclamation mark of ‘Press Heavenwards!’ gives away a Godspeed influence.
The exclamation mark in the title of ‘Press Heavenwards!’ gives away a Godspeed influence.

Answered by Andrew Leach on September 6, 2020

‘Press Heavenwards!’'s exclamation mark gives away a Godspeed influence.

Looks perfectly normal.

What else can you do? If your publication always uses single quotes for titles, that's the end of it.

This would come up every time you have a title ending with "s", so .. so what?

Seems to be a case of "what else can you do?"

Answered by Fattie on September 6, 2020

It should be:

The exclamation mark of "Press Heavenward!" gives away a Godspeed influence.

The exclamation mark in the title of "Press Heavenward!" gives away a Godspeed influence.

The following are incorrect:

The exclamation mark of ‘Press Heavenwards!’ gives away a Godspeed influence.

The exclamation mark in the title of ‘Press Heavenwards!’ gives away a Godspeed influence.

Answered by whippoorwill on September 6, 2020

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