Unprofessional possessive?

["Geoff Hart" <geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca>]

There's nothing whatsoever that's unprofessional about using 
possessives... nothing. The main (and perhaps only) caveats to 
that statement are that (i) the style must be appropriate for your 
audience, and (ii) the meaning must be clear and unequivocal. In 
fact, that's pretty much the touchstone for assessing any rule 
concerning word usage and style in relation to technical 
communication. Anyone who makes such a rule without subjecting 
it to those two tests isn't thinking things through.

As for contractions of any sort posing difficulties for translators, 
that's an outright myth. Any translator who can't handle common 
contractions should be fired on the spot. I make an exception for 
misleading contractions, in which the contraction has two possible 
meanings and isn't clear even to an English reader: for example, 
"how's it going?" could (taken completely out of context) be short 
for "how is" or "how was". I've encountered better examples, but 
they're not coming to mind right now. Where contractions _do_ 
pose a problem is for readers whose native tongue isn't English, 
and who aren't yet good enough at reading the second language to 
be good at translating it into their birth language so they can 
understand what it means. (Once you're fluent in a language, that 
translation becomes automatic... which is why native English 
readers have little or no difficulty understanding contractions.) This 
"readers translate your words into their own internal language" 
process is almost certainly the source of the myth that translators 
can't handle contractions.

--Geoff Hart @8^{)}  geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca  (Pointe-Claire, Quebec)
"If you can't explain it to an 8-year-old, you don't understand it"--Albert Einstein