It's or its? It's easy!

It’s or its? It’s easy!

Susan Pierotti, Creative Text Solutions

 

When is it “it’s” and when is it “its”?

 

So many people have said to me that they don’t know that I will now show you how easy it is to remember and get it right every time.

 

Why the confusion?

Prior to the invention of the printing press, way back before the 1450s, people wrote everything out by hand. There were no ink-filled pens, no pencils and often no paper. The writing was usually done by monks with goose quills onto material made of the hides of sheep (parchment), vellum (calves) or even papyrus (woven reeds). No smooth ballpoint ink across silky paper, but scratching onto skins by daylight or the light of candles. The creation of just one page could take eight hours!

 

Are you getting a sense of intensive labour here? Because it was – long, hard and tedious. Even manuscripts as gorgeous as the Book of Kells, or as historically informative as medieval government records, were written manually.

 

And if more than one copy was wanted, guess how that was done? No photocopiers!

 

Shortcuts

So shortcuts were put in by scribes as a way of letting the reader know the intention without having to write out the full text.

 

We also do it when we speak. “Haven’t”, “can’t” and “they’re” are all instances of spoken abbreviations, what linguists call “elisions”. We know that the fuller meaning of these are “have not”, “cannot” and “they are”.

 

And so to “it’s” and “its”. The apostrophe was invented as a visual shortcut. It’s a device that is understood to stand in place of missing letters. Therefore the word “it’s” is really two words – “it is”.

 

It’s or its? Easy!

And now you have the way to remember if it is “it’s” or “its”. If you can read it in context as “it is” and it makes sense, then it HAS the apostrophe. If it doesn’t make sense, leave it out.

 

Let me give you an example. In the following passage, I’ll put X for either “it’s” or “its”. Remember, if you can’t make sense reading it as “it is”, leave out the apostrophe. See if you can work it out:

 

When the dog wags X tail, X showing that X happy to see you.

 

Did you succeed? There is only one of the Xs that can’t be read as “it is” – the first one.

 

This is what it should look like:

 

When the dog wags its tail, it’s (it is) showing that it’s (it is) happy to see you.

 

It’s that easy!

 

Contact me at http://www.creativetext.com.au for all your proofreading and editing needs.