Take the 2-minute tour ×
English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It's 100% free, no registration required.

This commitment ensures when there is an opportunity to improve on our members’ quality of life, we have the information needed

share|improve this question

closed as general reference by RegDwigнt Jan 18 '13 at 18:12

This question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information.If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.

3 Answers 3

yes, it is the quality of life that belongs to (plural) members, thus an s' is proper.

share|improve this answer

You can have either members' or members's. Some style-guides recommend the latter, but I personally much prefer the former. If you don't have to follow a given style-guide, then it's up to you.

Yes, you use an apostrophe after the S.

(I was previously remembering wrong above. The case that some guides disagree with my taste on is when there is an apostrophe following a word that ends in S for another reason - some use s', some s's and some have more complicated rules - so you can have e.g. boss' in some guides and boss's in others. I was mis-remembering which ways some of them disagree with me).

The sentence should perhaps though be:

This commitment ensures that when there is an opportunity to improve our members’ quality of life, we have the information needed.

This adds a that, and changes "improves on" to "improves". The idiom "improves on" means to do better in another case. You don't want to make somebody's quality of life better than your members', you want to make your members' quality of life better.

share|improve this answer

You're referring to a noun (quality of life) possessed by more than one member, so yes, it should read "members'".

I'd like to suggest revising the statement to something like, "(Name of person, group, company, etc. as a possessive...) commitment to X ensures we have the needed information to improve our members' quality of life at every opportunity."

For example: "Green Hills Nursing Home's commitment to digital record keeping ensures we have the needed information to improve our members' quality of life at every opportunity."

  • I've found it more effective to remove potential ambiguity by replacing "this", "that", and "they" with the actual subject(s).
  • It removes the unnecessary "when there".
  • It removes the need for a comma.
share|improve this answer

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.
{"cc_re__cc_re__cc_by_sa_3_0": ["sites in the Stack Exchange network\">Area 51</a></li>\r\n                        <li><a href=\"//careers.stackoverflow.com?utm_source=stackoverflow.com&amp;utm_medium=site-ui&amp;utm_campaign=footerlink\">Stack Overflow Careers</a></li>\r\n                    \r\n                </ol>\r\n            </td>\r\n    </tr>\r\n</table>\r\n                </div>\r\n            </div>\r\n\r\n            <div id=\"copyright\">\r\n                site design / logo &#169; 2014 stack exchange inc; user contributions licensed under <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/\" rel=\"license\">cc by-sa 3.0</a>                   with <a href=\"http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/\" rel=\"license\">attribution required</a>\r\n            </div>\r\n            <div id=\"svnrev\">\r\n                rev 2014.11.24.2041\r\n            </div>\r\n            \r\n        </div>\r\n    </div>\r\n    <noscript>\r\n        <div id=\"noscript-warning\">English Language &amp; Usage Stack Exchange works best with JavaScript enabled<img src=\"http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel/p-c1rF4kxgLUzNc.gif\" alt=\"\""], "copyright__copyright__copyright": [": \"Green Hills Nursing Home's commitment to digital record keeping ensures we have the needed information to improve our members' quality of life at every opportunity.\"\n\n  \u2022 I've found it more effective to remove potential ambiguity by replacing \"this\", \"that\", and \"they\" with the actual subject(s).\n  \u2022 It removes the unnecessary \"when there\".\n  \u2022 It removes the need for a comma.\nshare|improve this answer\n\nNot the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question."]}