I work for the University of Southern California's USC Games department.
How would I indicate possessive ownership of items belonging to that department.
Is
USC Games' student developers
correct? (Especially according to AP Style)
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Sign up to join this communityI work for the University of Southern California's USC Games department.
How would I indicate possessive ownership of items belonging to that department.
Is
USC Games' student developers
correct? (Especially according to AP Style)
USC Games' student developers
is a perfectly grammatical and standard phrase, conforming to AP style guidelines.
USC Games appears to be the name of a program at USC. It is also written USCGames on their own website: http://games.usc.edu/
The standard quoted by Sven Yargs in his comment is indeed clear on this point:
From The Associated Press Stylebook (2002): "possessives ... NOUNS PLURAL IN FORM, SINGULAR IN MEANING: Add only an apostrophe: mathematics' rules, measles' effects. ... Apply the same principle when a plural word occurs in the formal name of a singular entity: General Motors' profits, the United States' wealth.
-- Pluralization of an Plural Proper Noun (Organization)
Extracting directly from that statement, we get USCGames' student developers or USC Games' student developers.
Another example:
According to the U.S. State Department's International Religious Freedom Report for 2012, in Turkey there are 90,000 Armenian Orthodox . . ..
Source information:
Date 2015 Publication information Winter2015, Vol. 50 Issue 1, p167-173. 7p. Title THE IMPORTANCE OF DIALOGUE IN TURKEY Author Cetinkaya, Kenan; Source ACAD: Journal of Ecumenical Studies
Search result on State Department 's in the Corpus of Contemporary American English: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
Include the "department": "The USC Games Department's student developers."
"Games," in this case, is being used as an adjective (describing the kind of "department"), and not as a plural noun.
It is the Department -- specifically, the Games Department-- which possesses student developers, not the "Games".