This is my latest pet peeve. Don't schools teach this anymore? I am astounded by the number of times I've seen these used incorrectly in books and on professional blogs.
Here's a brief review:
Ownership by one person or thing: school's John's
Ownership by more than one person or thing: students'
Using its and it's:
When used as a possessive, use its: The truck lost its muffler
When used as a contraction--"it is": It's best not to question a judge in a courtroom.
When a word ends with the letter "s" (including a plural) to make it possessive use an apostrophe after the "s" without adding another "s": snakes'
How hard is that?
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2 comments:
I'm a publications editor and see these errors a lot, along with "your" for "you're." What annoys me more is how often "loose" is used for "lose."
Agreed! I'm an older (67) American teaching English in Korea. The kind of errors I see on the internet made by native English speakers upset me greatly. It's a terrible example for the rest of the world. Most of the people I teach here don't make those kinds of mistakes. The ones who do learned their English from the U.S. military, not from Korean English teachers.
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