3 ms·
The way I found to keep its and it's straight is to remember that its is one of the possessive pronouns, none of which take an apostrophe: my, your, his, her, i
by RyanMcGreal 17y ago
The way I found to keep its and it's straight is to remember that its is one of the possessive pronouns, none of which take an apostrophe: my, your, his, her, its, their.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- stcredzero 17y agoFor a lot of folks, that rule breaks down with you're.
- eru 17y agoSounds perfectly in line to me. Am I missing something?
- loup-vaillant 17y ago"you're" ("it's") is the contraction of "you are" ("it is"). "your" ("its") is the possessive. The contraction <=> apostrophe rule doesn't break for me in this case. How could it break for anyone?
- stcredzero 17y agoYes, but they go ahead and use the wrong homonym anyways. That's what I meant -- a criticism of too many erroneous posters. (But for some reason everyone took it as a criticism of the rule and voted me down.)
- RyanMcGreal 17y agoYour doing it wrong.
- loup-vaillant 17y agoYour doing it wrong. Did you actually mean a noun phrase? :-)
- RyanMcGreal 17y agoI was being facetiou's.
- teamonkey 17y agoWhen I have a brainfart and can't remember which one to use I always remember it the other way around: it's always a contraction. If you can write "it is" or "it has" in its place then use the apostrophe, otherwise don't.
- gojomo 17y agoI tend to remember this contextual demonstration: "It's" only "it is". Even though, it ignores "it has", and would more precisely be: "It's" is only "it is". The rule that possessive pronouns never have apostrophes is handy, too.