Who Wrote What? Joint and Separate Possession in Academic Writing

Writing about two or more nouns in the possessive case can be tricky. For example, if Amanda and Heidi authored a paper together, should we say, "Amanda's and Heidi's paper" or "Amanda and Heidi's paper"? It's an important question, especially in academic writing, where precision matters. You want to make sure you're attributing the right publications and ideas to the right people. In this post, we'll explore the difference between joint and separate possession, and look at a few examples from real-world scholarly writing.

But first, let me explain where I got the idea to examine this facet of English grammar.

A Tale of Two Countries (and Their Cities)

Whenever I see an article online about travel in Central and Eastern Europe, my finger immediately clicks to open the link. It's a part of the world I've called home for nearly half my life now, so I'm always curious to read what outsiders have to say about it.

A few weeks ago, as I was scrolling through the BBC's website, I came across an article titled "The Baltic Express: Central Europe's New Hop-on Hop-off Train." But before my finger pressed down on the left mouse button, I paused for a moment, thinking about the route this train might follow. The destination is surely in Poland, but where does the journey start? Click went my finger to find out. So, Prague to Gdansk…

As I was reading, I came across this sentence: "the eight-hour trip promises a scenic history tour through overlapping empires via some of the Czech Republic and Poland's most buzzing cities, including Gdansk and Poznan." Here we have a grammatical mistake caught in the wild! That's right, the use of the possessive form is incorrect here.

What's the problem? Along the route there are multiple towns and cities (some buzzing, some decidedly mellower). According to Czech Railways, trains "in the Czech Republic … will also stop in Kolín, Pardubice, Ústí nad Orlicí, Letohrad, Jablonné nad Orlicí and Lichkov. In Poland, they will continue via Kłodzko, Wrocław, Poznań and Bydgoszcz to Gdańsk, Sopot and Gdynia."

So, here we have a list of both Czech cities and Polish cities. But these cities don't belong to both the Czech Republic and Poland; they are not jointly "owned" by the two countries. Therefore, we need to express that the cities belong to both countries; to do so, we need to put both nouns in the possessive form.

The revised, correct sentence reads as follows: "the eight-hour trip promises a scenic history tour through overlapping empires via some of the Czech Republic's and Poland's most buzzing cities, including Gdansk and Poznan." (I would point out, however, that the named cities are both in Poland, so also mentioning a Czech city would be helpful here.)

This grammatical misstep from the world of journalistic writing highlights a common challenge in academic writing, one that I as an editor frequently encounter: correctly expressing possession when multiple entities are involved. Precision is a key component of academic writing; without it, readers might be unsure of your meaning or even misunderstand what you are trying to convey. When it comes to discussing the relationships between scholars and their ideas and publications, the possessive form plays a major role.

Now, let's break down the rules governing joint and separate possession. They're really quite simple.

Joint Possession

Joint possession occurs when two nouns share ownership of something. So, to answer the question I posed at the beginning of this post, it should be "Amanda and Heidi's paper." There is one paper that was the result of joint work conducted by both Amanda and Heidi.

Therefore, in cases of joint possession, add the possessive form (-'s) to only the last noun.

Here are some real-life examples from humanities writing to clarify how joint possession works:

Inside Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin's Nine Turbulent Weeks as Roommates

(The two artists lived together for nine weeks.)

"Although Emerson and Thoreau's friendship was pushed to the breaking point over the eventful seven-year period in which Thoreau drafted and redrafted this text..."[1]

(These two nineteenth-century US writers shared a single friendship.)

"There have been several attempts to reconstruct the score of Gilbert and Sullivan's first collaboration…"[2]

(This dramatist and composer created theatrical works together.)

Separate Possession

In cases of separate possession, add the possessive form (-'s) to all nouns. So, if Amanda and Heidi have had an acrimonious academic split and now work separately, developing their own ideas and writing their own publications, we can talk about "Amanda's and Heidi's papers."

Again, here are some real-life examples from humanities writing to clarify how separate possession works:

"The influence of both Freud's and Jung's forays into anthropology has been long…"[3]

(Both Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung explored anthropology but did so separately.)

"These objectives, I argue, inform Baldwin's and Morrison's black male subjects."[4]

(These US authors wrote their own separate books featuring Black men.)

"Plato's and Aristotle's Answers to the Parmenides Problem"

(Plato and Aristotle developed their own separate solutions to the same problem.)

Mixing Up Shared and Separate Possession in Academic Writing

Everyone makes mistakes in their writing, and it's not just students and authors whose first language isn't English. As a matter of fact, when I was searching for real examples of joint and separate possession in academic writing, I came across published occurrences of incorrect phrases such as "Emerson's and Thoreau's friendship" and "Freud and Jung's psychology." These persistent mistakes got past the authors, editors, and proofreaders.

Above, I gave some examples properly expressing joint and separate possession culled mostly from texts included in Google Scholar. As an editor, though, I've encountered confusion about apostrophe placement most frequently in one particular context: when my clients refer to studies written by more than one researcher or theories developed by multiple thinkers.

There is one collaborative duo that pops into my mind immediately, as they feature in many articles I have edited, especially in the fields of literature and aesthetics: that of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. In the second half of the twentieth century, they co-authored several seminal books that influenced postmodernism and poststructuralism. But the main thing is that they wrote together, so they have joint ownership of their works. So, be careful to write about Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (not Deleuze's and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus).

The same caution applies to lesser-known collaborative authors.

Let's say you are using the author-date reference system of The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) and want to make in-text references to works with more than one author. If you are using the possessive forms of the authors' names, proceed with caution. But we've already gone over the rules. You know what you're doing now. You've got this!

Perhaps you want to cite this paper:

Haen, Craig, and Anna Marie Weber. 2009. "Beyond Retribution: Working through Revenge Fantasies with Traumatized Young People." The Arts in Psychotherapy 36 (2): 84–93. doi.org/10.1016/j.aip.2009.01.005.

In that case, make sure you are writing about "Haen and Weber's (2009) paper."

The same goes for the following reference:

Dombos, Tamás, and Lena Pellandini-Simanyi. "Kids, Cars, or Cashews? Debating and Remembering Consumption in Socialist Hungary." Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe (2012): 325–50.

Again, a correct in-text citation using the possessive might look like this: "Dombos and Pellandini-Simanyi's (2012) examination of consumption in Hungary poses the question…"

For further reading, you can also see CMOS sections 5.24 Joint and separate genitives and 7.23: Joint versus separate possession.

Summing It All Up

Understanding the distinction between joint and separate possession is crucial in academic writing. Remember these simple rules: for joint possession (shared ownership), add the possessive form (-'s) only to the final noun, and for separate possession (individual ownership), add the possessive form (-'s) to each noun.

If you are citing publications with more than one author or exploring theories developed by multiple scholars, take some time to check if you have used the correct possessive constructions. You want to make sure you are accurately conveying the relationships between ideas, publications, and their creators.

If you need some extra help making sure you are working with the possessive correctly, get in touch with me.

[1] Meredith McGill, "Common Places: Poetry, Illocality, and Temporal Dislocation in Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," American Literary History 19, no. 2 (2022): 366.

[2] Robert Broude, "The Gilbert & Sullivan Critical Edition and the Full Scores that Never Were," Documentary Editing 31 (2010): 45.

[3] Robert Kenny, "Freud, Jung and Boas: The Psychoanalytic Engagement with Anthropology Revisited," Notes and Records 69 (2015): 184.

[4] Aaron Ngozi Oforlea, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and the Rhetorics of Black Male Subjectivity (Ohio State University Press, 2017).