Believe it or not, Google can improve your writing.
A trainee on one of my courses asked me a tricky question recently: Should an apostrophe be used in this phrase or not?
“one night’s accommodation”
i.e. does the night “own” the accommodation?
What if it was plural, as in “five nights accommodation”?
Do you know the answer? If you aren’t sure, and want to do a quick ‘n’ dirty check, try Google.
The trick
Just Google both options, using inverted commas (” “) around your search phrase, to see which gets the highest results. So you’d first search for “one nights accommodation” (26,000 hits), then “one night’s accommodation” (114,000 hits). Clearly the latter is the most used version, and, as it happens, is correct.
But now try the plural version: “five nights accommodation” (8,000 hits) vs. “five night’s accommodation” (112 hits). Again, a resounding win for the former, this time without the apostrophe. And it’s correct. [Source: Aust. Govt Style Manual, 6th edition.]
The exception
The only caveat is that the number of Google hits must be wildly different. If similar, don’t trust them; look it up elsewhere. For example, “two night’s accommodation” yields 64,000 hits, while “two nights accommodation” gets fewer hits, 61,000, yet is correct.
This method isn’t foolproof (because a lot of fools write badly on the Web), but it is a quick way to double check your hunch. And if American vs. British spellings cause problems, use the country-specific version of Google, e.g. www.google.co.uk.
Got any other tips you’d like to share? Comment away!
3 thoughts on “Using Google to write right”
I’m going to have to be pedantic here. Five night’s accommodation was just plain wrong as you placed a singular construction with a multiple noun. While there is a personal usage bias and the evolution of language means that solutions we use grammatically can look “quaint” twenty years on (Mr. Rudd vs Mr Rudd, for example”) but you get about 1,340 for “five nights’ accommodation” which is actually what I would consider correct.
Money and time take apostrophes in some cases, so you need to decide whether they possess the object in question or not. Five night’s was wrong, regardless. Whether five nights’ could be correct is still being debated, from what I can see.
I think we actually agree, Sadhbh. I said the former (without the apostrophe) was correct, not the latter.
As to whether it’s “five nights’ accommodation,” (apostrophe after the “s”) I get the same result (1420) for both – with and without the apostrophe. As I said, this is a quick ‘n’ DIRTY technique, and you should only let it guide you if the Google results are wildly different.
In that case, I’d go to an official source, like the Australian Government Publishing Service’s latest Style Manual, which says to leave the apostrophe off. They’re not infallible either, of course, but these things are a matter of “convention” anyway, so you could be pretty confident following their advice.
By the way, your point about “Mr. Rudd” vs. “Mr Rudd” is good. At school and uni I learned that if an abbreviation ended in the same letter that the word it was abbreviating ended in, you didn’t need a period. So “Mister” could be “Mr”, but “Professor” should be “Prof.” (with a period). Anyone disagree?
Interesting post.
Writing for Google re SEO you may in fact have to break the rules sometimes to gain the eyeballs of your readers. For examples many companies spell common mispellings incorrectly as they know they will garner the eyeballs that way. Ensuring you get the visibility you need with the right content is paramount.
Jenni Beattie
Director
http://digitaldemocracy.com.au/