Learn English – Possessive apostrophe for song title ending in a exclamation and in quotes

exclamation-markpossessives

I'm subbing a piece a of writing that contains the following sentence.

‘Press Heavenwards!’ exclamation mark gives away a Godspeed influence.

'Press Heavenwards!' is a song title that includes an exclamation mark. In our publication song titles are distinguished by single quote marks. Obviously the possessive case of the song title is being used, but how to signify it?

Best Answer

Setting the title in italics, which is not unusual, would solve the problem:

Press Heavenwards!’s exclamation mark gives away a Godspeed influence.

If setting in italics is not an option, perhaps because of your house style, then the quotation marks collide with the necessary apostrophe, as you've noted. It’s also likely that that sentence would be pronounced as heavenwards’ rather than heavenwards’s, which causes its own difficulties in adding ’s to the title.

One solution is to recast the sentence in order not to use the Saxon genitive:

The exclamation mark of ‘Press Heavenwards!’ gives away a Godspeed influence.
The exclamation mark in the title of ‘Press Heavenwards!’ gives away a Godspeed influence.

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