make people use "its" and "it's" correctly

I don’t think this goal can ever be accomplished. In recent weeks, I have seen “its” misused in advertising, correspondence from an attorney, and on a bank’s web site. Discouraging.

This is a VERY hesitant “worth doing”. As a teacher, I’ve successfully insinuated this rule into many students’ heads, because the content standards say they need to know basic grammatical rules. And because I know they’re going to be judged on this kind of thing in the “real world”. But I seriously question if we should really place so much importance on persnickety grammatical rules. Being a special ed teacher has taught me not to judge intelligence by nonessentials like this… so I’m trying not to be so judgmental about things like “it’s/its” and “your/you’re” when I encounter these errors outside the classroom. Which is difficult because to me, it just doesn’t seem that hard. But, math beyond the 10th grade level probably doesn’t seem that hard to lots of people… and it’s damn near impossible for me.

English is such an overly-complicated language, with so many counterintuitive rules… maybe we need to focus more on students’ ability to acquire useful information and communicate, rather than making such a huge deal of their ability to memorize minutiae. After all, the fact that we can tell whether the apostrophe should be there or not, means that we understand what the sentence is trying to say- shouldn’t that be the main concern?

For that matter, maybe we should go back to the pre-19th c. approach to spelling. Or hell, just revamp the whole damn language so it actually makes sense.

this could take a while…

Is a lot of fun!

brandishes red pen of editing doom!

Its just not that important… the language will change it’s syntax based on usage. (Although I do enjoy explaining the “it is” system… hmm… nah, not worth it.)

although it can get somewhat irritating for those on the receiving end

Everyone listen to Strong Bad!

it’s and its really are so easy to remember. use logic.

“its” is a possessive pronoun, like “his” and “hers/her.” note that possessive pronouns - even the ones that end in an “s” - don’t have apostrophes.

“it’s” is a contraction of “it is,” like “didn’t” and “won’t.” note that all of those /do/ have apostrophes.

it’s really not hard; people just don’t like to think.

as a bonus, other things that drive me crazy: “your” and “you’re”; “there” and “their”; “to” and “too”; and those annoying people who refuse to put a comma after the next-to-last thing in a list of more than 2 things (correct – “dogs, cats, and rabbits”; incorrect – “dogs, cats and rabbits”). my personal opinion is that people just don’t care. at all. or they’re stupid. or lazy. kinda like me i guess, cuz you’ll notice i don’t capitalize when typing this sort of thing lol.

~aimee

I’ve set one friend straight on the record, so I’m checking this as done.