Here are two wonderful and important concepts from a blog post I was reading and which inspired me to write this morning:
Social Networking at it’s very foundation is building relationships with people…
Social networking at it’s finest: making friends and helping each other at the same time.
Do you know the difference between “it’s” and “its”? Chances are that you don’t. There’s even a facebook page about it’s and its (that’s where I found the graphic).
Using it is when you mean its and its when you mean it is ranks up there as the most common mistake I see in online and offline writing. My undergrad college students get it wrong and my graduate students in education got it wrong too.
This is the most common spelling, punctuation or grammar mistake that I find online. And I find at least a few examples of it every day in online publishing. In fact, as I mentioned above, this post itself is inspired by a blog post where “it’s” was used wrong more than once and both times in a headline as shown above.
(The second most common mistake? Using semi-colons–I’ll get to that next!)
Most of the time the writer who uses its/it’s wrong has strong content and writing skills (like in this case), but doesn’t know when to use “it’s” or to use “its”; these writers tend to use one or the other all the time, possibly on the false assumption they’d be correct 50% of the time. (If I was to take this strategy, I’d use “its” not “it’s,” by the way…)
Learning how to use “its” or “it’s” is one of the first orders of business when I am working with someone on writing.
So when do you use “it’s” and when do you use “its”? (more…)
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Gwendolyn Alley aka Art Predator
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