The correct answer is C) The two girls' shoes were left out in the rain; of course, they got muddy and wet.
Explanation:
Semicolons (;) are common punctuation mak use to link independent sentences, elements in a list, and also before transition such as however, therefore or in addition . On the other hand, apostrophes (') are used to express possessions usually by adding an apostrophe followed by an s in case of nouns that do not end in -s or only the apostrophe if the noun already ends in -s.
This implies, in the case presented the correct sentence is "The two girls' shoes were left out in the rain; of course, they got muddy and wet" because in this case the semicolon has been placed before "of course" that works as a transition, also the word "of" has not been capitalized and a comma has been placed after it which is considered as correct. On the other hand, the apostrophe is correctly used in "girls' shoes" because as "girls" end in "s" only the apostrophe needs to be added at the end of the word.
