|
Is It Bachelors Degree or Bachelor's Degree?
|
|
One of the ironies of education is that many people receive four-year degrees in the U.S. each year but aren't sure whether their achievement needs to be written with an apostrophe. Even if you did well in English and grammar courses earlier on, such a detail may not be something you address every day.
Do You Use an Apostrophe When Spelling Bachelor's Degree?
The short answer is that bachelor's degree—with an apostrophe—is correct.
The reason for this is simple: In former times, a bachelor's degree was a degree awarded to a bachelor. In old English, this meant a young man (and possibly a knight) who had completed the lowest degree level at a university. Such a person was called a bachelor, so a bachelor's degree was the academic designation ascribed to their educational level.
Should Bachelor's Degree Be Capitalized?
If you had been wondering only whether bachelor's degree takes an apostrophe, that would be the end of things. However, you might also be looking to include that term on a resume or other official document. With that in mind, you might want to know about capitalization as well.
Bachelor's degree is typically not capitalized when being used as a regular noun (for example, in this sentence). That's because in everyday speech and writing, it is expressed as a category. However, you may also often see it as part of a specific title. In those cases, it would usually be capitalized.
For example, you would capitalize it in the following sentence:
| I have a Bachelor of Science degree. |
In this case, it is being used as a proper noun so it needs to be capitalized. And of course, bachelor could also be capitalized if it's part of a title or a headline or if it falls at the start of a sentence.
It's also worth noting that the same guidelines apply to a master's degree. You would normally use an apostrophe in the term, but you wouldn't capitalize unless it was part of a formal title such as Master of Business Administration.
|
View and comment on this
article on our website.
|
|
|
|
 |
The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation
by Lester Kaufman and Jane Straus |
The Authority on English Grammar! Twelfth Edition Now Available
An indispensable tool for busy professionals, teachers, students, homeschool families, editors, writers, and proofreaders.
Available in print AND as an e-Book! Over 2,000 copies are purchased every month!
To order the book, simply click the link to order the book from the GrammarBook.com website.
|
Free BONUS Quiz for You!
[[firstname]], because you are a subscriber to the newsletter, you get access to one of the Subscribers-Only Quizzes. Click here to take a Confusing Words and Homonyms Quiz and get your scores and explanations instantly!
We will be adding many more quizzes this year to our already substantial list of them. If you have suggestions for topics we have not yet covered, please send us a message at help@grammarbook.com.
|
Hundreds of Additional Quizzes
at Your Fingertips
Subscribe now to receive hundreds of additional English usage quizzes not found anywhere else!
Teachers and Employers
Save hours of valuable time! You may assign quizzes to your students and employees and have their scores tallied, organized, and reported to you! Let GrammarBook.com take the hassle out of teaching English!
"Fun to test my skills."
"The explanations really help ... thanks!"
"I can select the quizzes to assign to my students, and then the results are reported to me automatically!"
If you think you have found an error in a quiz, please email us at help@grammarbook.com
|
Wordplay
|
 |
English In A Snap:
68 One-Minute English Usage Videos FREE |
Learn all about who and whom, affect and effect, subjects and verbs, adjectives and adverbs, commas, semicolons, quotation marks, and much more by just sitting back and enjoying these easy-to-follow lessons. Share them with your colleagues (and boss), children, teachers, and friends as well! Click here to watch.
|
|
