Thank you, Bigg Red.
Seeing these types of errors bothers my eye the way the sound of a sharp note played instead of a flat would bother the ear. I also find it mystifying, because until I joined FR I never encountered such a quantity of people - who appear to be educated and intelligent - who didn’t know how to make a noun plural. Where does this using the apostrophe at the end of a word come from? Is this what American public schools have been teaching?
And to those who would call me a grammar Nazi - if I wrote that 12x100=1.2O wouldn’t you say something if I kept putting decimal points were none were called for? I hope so, because I’m terrible at arithmetic. So if I did, and you did, I’d thank you, not call you a math Nazi.
I am sorry to say that most of the blame does rest on the state of public school education. The students are just not taught composition and grammar the way my generation was. It is truly dreadful.
Sadly, it is the case that the teachers themselves often are unsure of correct usage. Sometimes, I suspect, they are too lazy to assign the writing of a composition because it is very time consuming to read and correct a stack of such assignments.