(Forgive my grammar nazism.) The possessive form of "it" is "its": "The dog wagged its tail". But for basically everything other than pronouns and plurals, the possessive form involves adding "apostrophe s". In recent years, many people have tried to apply this rule to "it". But the problem is that "it's" is understood to be a contraction of "it is" or "it has"; furthermore, "its" already exists as the standard possessive form.
One thing I say to people using "it's" is that by analogy, you also need to say: "He got he's skills. She missed she's ride. They have they's meeting."
Thank you a ton for posting this! I've been doing this for most/all of my life and it didn't really make sense till now. I've had people explain it before but it didn't really make sense. Here's what I got from what you wrote (please correct me if this is wrong / kinda off in some way)
For most words, the possessive form is "<word>'s"
For pronouns (including it) there are different rules. He becomes his, she goes to hers, it goes to its.
Also, words that already end in s don't get the " 's " treatment.
(Question - for words that end in "s", we put the apostrophe after the existing, ending 's', yes?)
Thanks again for posting this - viewing the possessive form of it as (yet another English language) exception to the normal rule of " 's " is really helpful.
> One thing I say to people using "it's" is that by analogy, you also need to say: "He got he's skills. She missed she's ride. They have they's meeting."
This is a great distillation of the intuition I've always had, but never quite verbalized.
One thing I say to people using "it's" is that by analogy, you also need to say: "He got he's skills. She missed she's ride. They have they's meeting."