As I was student, the bracketed plurals were absolute 'NO, NO'.

With this simple function you can cleanly avoid putting bracket plural(s) after your numbers.

If the number deciding singular/plural should not be automatically included, you can make version with str(n)+' '+ eliminated. If you want to put automatically space separator around the expression, you can add that also. You can also put here number to words routine for small integers for "one apple" and "ten apples".

P.S. In Finnish this is more useful still as we have various partitive form after number: