Daily tip: customer's, customers, customers'
Yesterday in the Writing Feedback lesson we did this question:
The personal information of many individuals is held by large companies and organisations.
Do you think the advantages of this outweigh the disadvantages?
In the responses many students wanted to refer to 'information about customers'.
This caused a few issues with plural 's' and possessive 's'.
Here are the rules:
1. singular: a customer's information
2. plural: customers' information
The problem is that singular is not quite right in every context because we are talking about many customers.
Plural is ok but a little 'clumsy'.
So, the solution is to remove the 's' and the apostrophe, and just say 'customer information'. Now, 'customer' is an adjective. This is much more natural.
I double-checked this on Ludwig.guru
There are many examples of using a noun (customer) as an adjective before another noun, and it helps you avoid all the problems with 's' and apostrophes.
