A little help please ......

[William]

Should I say, '_________'?

1) 'I have ten years' teaching experience.'

or

2) 'I have ten-year teaching experience.'

or

3) 'I have teaching experience of ten years.'

William

[Lorikeet]

Should I say, '_________'?

1) 'I have ten years' teaching experience.'

or

2) 'I have ten-year teaching experience.'

or

3) 'I have teaching experience of ten years.'

William

Hmm, oddly enough, I think I'd say, "I have ten years of teaching experience." Of your three examples, only number 1 sounds possible to my ears. (Wait to hear about the rest of the ears )

[Glenski]

#1 is ok.
#2 and #3 are incorrect. (#3 is almost right; sounds unnatural)

You can also say what William has written. That and #1 are common.

[William]

Thanks for your replies.

I looked up a grammar book. It states that the possessive is also used with nouns denoting time, space or weight; as, a day's march; a week's holiday; a foot's length.

Therefore, "ten years' experience" is correct. But I wonder if I use 'of' for the posessive, is it possible? For example, 'These are the laws of nature' or 'These are the nature's laws'.

Then should I say, 'ten years of experience' or 'experience of ten years'?

Also, if I use the compound noun 'ten-year', is it not acceptable in this case? Why? For example, 'I will give a ten-mintue speech tomorrow' sounds fine.

William

[Lorikeet]

I can't think of an example where we can use "ten-year" or "three-minute" before an uncountable noun. Can anyone think of one? I keep wanting to put an "a" before the "ten-year" experience, but of course that wouldn't work. At the moment, I can't think of an example where the construction appears without the "a" in front. (Except for plural, as in "I bought 20 10-cent stamps.")

[Chercheuse]

I don't think you should have an apostrophe for I have 10 years' experience. I don't think the plural form of years in this case is an example of the genitive or possessive. I suspect it's really I have ten years experience, and that it's really just an informal, unwritten, shortened form of I have ten years of experience. The "of phrase" simply describes the noun further with more information, much like He is a man of good character. You wouldn't use the genitive with the following examples, which seem very similar:

I have ten pounds of apples. (Would anyone suggest that this could be written ten pounds' apples?! I suppose maybe you could informally say 10 pounds apples, but it wouldn't be genitive. I doubt I would say it, though)
She's taken many years of math. (Never: many years' math)

It seems to me that the examples you gave from the grammar book are not the same thing as the experience example.:

I have a day's march ahead of me. (The main noun is march here. You could also use an "of phrase": I have a march of about a day ahead of me. Either way it's clear that march is the main thought here, and day is just helping to describe it.)
I have ten years experience. (I would propose here that the head noun is 10 years, although you would not normally say I have ten years without adding a descriptor behind it. The fact that we can say 10 years of experience is further evidence that 10 years is the head noun here.)

Also consider:
10 years experience is a lot.
If you think that 10 years is really 10 years', then experience is the head noun. That can't be right, because it's the 10 years that is a lot, not the experience.

Some of your other questions are stemming from the fact that you're assuming years is a possessive. If we assume that it's not, then there should be no mystery in the fact that experience of ten years is wrong.

So, we can drop the "of" in I have ten years of experience when speaking, not writing. But that seems to be somewhat of an isolated case, as I don't think most people would accept dropping the "of" at all in other cases:
They endured ten years misery (No. Definitely not.)
I have ten boxes books. (No!!)
I have four weeks work ahead of me (maybe. I think I could say it.)
He got four months probation (Sounds ok.)

[Stephen Jones]

Truss deals with this particular use of the apostophe fairly well.

You can argue it's fussy, but I would say it's better to put it in, and would always do so, if I were in the least consistent

You seem to have some strange mental block over ten years' experience which is exactly the same as two days' time

Ten years' experience may be a lot of experience, but it's not a lot of years, as you will find out when you get to my and Larry's age

[woodcutter]

Perhaps the "of" in "I have ten years of experience" is the "of" of a block of wood, or 10 pounds of apples, meaning "made up from".

That would then leave a choice between "10 years' experience" and "experience of ten years" as a possessive structure. In many cases, though not in "nature's laws" these are not completely interchangeable. We cannot say "The bag of John". We perhaps tend to go for the apostrophe when dealing with something easily personified, or an actual person. And strangely, as William wrote, this would seem to include time, space and weight.