Lol, at first I read that wrong, and was like "what the hell?" Now it makes sense. Thanks, that's what I thought I just wanted to be sure, so I didn't go on writing that way if it was wrong. My job is writing, so I have to make sure I'm writing properly, so I can get paid more.
Just one other point that seems to have gone overlooked. It's I've written, not I've wrote. I have written denotes incompletion of action, action in a general sense, or on multiple occasions. I wrote indicates completion of action and also single occurrence event. The auxiliary verb never accompanies wrote (or ran, another very common error I see).
yup! just for the record, cog: 'thats' and 'whats' can be used in the same way as 'ifs, ands, or buts'...
I was about to make the same comment. As is usually the case, the simplified rule ("thats is not a word") is just the job for your own writing, but not a basis on which to judge other people's writing (because they might know of complications the rule doesn't cover).
This forum makes me enjoy novels and generally english less and less. All I notice now are mistakes. D: Ignorance IS happiness.
Oh, I disagree. Awareness makes me enjoy the well-turned phrase all the more. Who appreciates a fine gem more, the person who sees that it sparkles nicely, or the one who recognizes the gem's clarity, its nuances of color, and the cutter's choice of the facet arrangement?
That's one of my biggest fears about simple rules (and why I tend to point out complications). It's a key writing skill to read with an eye to how what works works and why what doesn't work doesn't work. But if you decide whether something works based on the rules you already know then you lose that ability. If you see something that doesn't fit what you think the rules are, don't assume it's a mistake: try to work out why the author has done that, and see whether it works. Maybe the rules are more complex than you thought, maybe the rules are not as globally applicable as you thought, maybe the author is intentionally breaking the rules for a particular effect, or maybe it is indeed a mistake. If a text really does have lots of actual mistakes then it's hard to imagine you would have enjoyed it before following this forum.
I think the conversation has shifted, but I just wanted to share. The way I teach my students about "its versus it's" is to write out a two-column list with the basic third-person pronouns on the left: he, she, and it. On the right side, I write out the possessive forms of he and she: his and hers. I ask them if they would write these as "hi's" and "her's." When they say no, I tell them the same rule applies to it when it comes to possessive. That book is his (not hi's). That pencil is hers (not her's). All the same rule. Hope that helps! Just so you know, even as an ENGLISH teacher, I sometimes have to stop and think as I write to make sure I'm following the correct rule. "Its" is one of the times. I break it down in my head to see if I'm writing a contraction or not. I even have to do that for some words. I STILL say "finite" in my head when I spell the word definitely.
sorry to be such an uber-nit-picker, lisa, but i have a serious problem with your using [ hi's ] in your lesson, since the possessive is about adding an apostrophe [and often an 's'] to the existing word, not inserting an apostrophe into the existing word... so, if i were making up that list of yours, i'd use [ his' or he's] as the wrong example, not [ hi's ], since 'hi' is not an existing pronoun... but i could be wrong, since i'm so perfect i know i'm not!... love and apologetic hugs, maia
It's better to treat the personal possessive pronouns that don't contain an apostrophe as a list to be memorized, rather than to try to make a rule of it. The common personal pronouns do follow the pattern, but it's not true of all of them. For example, whose is such a pronoun, but one's or everyone's do not. I know rote memorization is unpopular. I don't care for it much myself. But sometimes it makes more sense than trying to constructing a rickety rule. Also, rules based on intuition ("it won't sound right.") fail miserably with students continually exposed to poor grammar.
Me too, I'm glad I'm not the only one. When I write separate I have to spell "sep-er-RAH-tee" in my head. Luckily I've mastered doing this in silence. I'm pretty sure the possessive "its" was just put in English Language to test who pays attention to their grammar lessons. I've learned a lot from this thread, though, thanks all.
'Tis true. I reckon I have a pretty good intuition for apostrophes (I still make the occasional blunder, but at least it's pretty much always obvious to me that i have made a blunder when I look at it again), but that comes from more years than I care to admit of seeing it done properly (and being old enough to have had an old-fashioned education -- it had its weaknesses, but that was a strength). The tricky cases are, of course, the transitional ones. If I pluralise "photo" I get "photos", whereas if I contract "photographs" I get "photo's". I'd argue that both are correct, and the strong feelings lots of people have on the subject are stylistic, not grammatical.
A word that the follows rules of a language but isn't grammatically considered a word only need's to have a good use to become one. For example in a YouTube comment in response to I said: "I don't support people's usage of a poisonous substance thats high is not making you feel like sh!t when you're not smoking it. However, I don't try to stop people..." The (thats) used in that sentence is based on the contraction (its), and indicates possession. In this case was saying that the nicotine and stuff in tobacco possesses the potential for a high that produces the aforementioned effect.
Never take spelling or grammar advice from Google. It's used by far too many people who don't know the language... and I'm not talking about non-English-speaking people.
English is one of the hardest languages to learn in the world. Purely because there are a lot of contextual changes that occur in each and every sentence which affect how the mechanics can work. Basically, it's all about the context of the sentence, what is being written about and how.
What application would that be? What do they mean? Unless you're writing a sentence like "The whys and the whats of the matter are something we may never know," or "His brain was too full of thises [I prefer "thisses"] and thats, he could never remember them all." And I suppose "Hes" would be a nice nickname for a girl named Hester. Otherwise . . .
Good gosh. I've just been Oh, shiny!ed into replying to an ancient thread. And I should be working on my writing, as I have a pressing deadline.
The contraction you're looking for is that's, not thats. "Thats" has no function not filled by "that's". Edited to add: also, "its" is not a contraction. "it's" is.
