Literary agents estimate that more than half of all nonfiction books credited to a celebrity or other public figure are...

Let's begin by understanding the meaning of this sentence. We'll use our understanding of pause points and segment the sentence as shown - understanding and assimilating the meaning of each segment bit by bit!

Sentence Structure

• Literary agents estimate
  • that more than half of all nonfiction books credited to a celebrity or other public figure
    • are in fact written by ghostwriters,
      • professional authors who are paid to write other [?]
        • but whose names never appear on book covers.

Understanding the Meaning

Let's start from the beginning:

'Literary agents estimate that more than half of all nonfiction books credited to a celebrity or other public figure are in fact written by ghostwriters'

This is telling us something interesting about the publishing world:

• Many celebrity nonfiction books aren't actually written by the celebrities
• They're written by ghostwriters instead

Then we get more detail:

• 'professional authors who are paid to write other ______'

This is where we have the blank. Let's look at the choices:

• A. people's stories
• B. peoples story's
• C. peoples stories
• D. people's story's

I can see the choices vary in:

• Whether it's "people" or "peoples"
• Whether it's "story" or "stories"
• Where apostrophes appear

To see what works here, let's read the rest of the sentence and understand what it's saying!

The sentence continues:

• 'but whose names never appear on book covers'

So the complete picture is:

• Ghostwriters are professional authors who write for OTHER people (the celebrities/public figures)
• These books/stories BELONG to those other people - they're credited to them
• But the ghostwriters' names don't appear on the covers

What do we notice about the relationship here?

• The stories belong to other people - this is a possessive relationship
  • The ghostwriters write stories that are possessed by/owned by other people
• For this possessive relationship, we need:
  • "People" (the correct plural form of person - not "peoples" which refers to ethnic groups or nations)
  • "People's" with an apostrophe + s to show possession (these stories belong to the people)
  • "Stories" as a simple plural (no apostrophe) because it's the object being written - ghostwriters write multiple stories

So we need people's stories - showing that the stories belong to other people.

The correct answer is Choice A.

GRAMMAR CONCEPT APPLIED

Forming Possessives with Irregular Plural Nouns

When you need to show that something belongs to someone, you use a possessive form (called a possessive noun in grammar terms). The tricky part is that the rules differ depending on whether the noun is singular, regularly plural, or irregularly plural:

Pattern 1 - Regular plurals that end in 's':

• Simple plural: The writers collaborated (no apostrophe - just plural)
• Possessive plural: The writers' stories were published (apostrophe after the s)

Pattern 2 - Irregular plurals that DON'T end in 's' (like "people," "children," "men," "women"):

• Simple plural: The people gathered (no apostrophe - just plural)
• Possessive plural: The people's opinions matter (apostrophe + s, just like a singular possessive)

Pattern 3 - When possession + object appear together:

• The possessor gets the apostrophe: people's
• The object stays as simple plural: stories
• Result: ghostwriters write other people's stories

In this question:

• We need to show possession (stories belong to other people): people's ✓
• "People" is already an irregular plural of "person"
• Add apostrophe + s to show possession: people's
• The object "stories" stays as a simple plural (no apostrophe needed)