[photo via The Abuse of Apostrophes in Everyday Life]

This has got to be the most widespread copy writing mistake I see, online and elsewhere. So, take my hand, and let’s walk through it together…

It’s and its get confused all the the time. Usually, people mistakenly write the word it’s when they want to make it possessive. (See the pizza box above.) This makes sense, because if you want one thing to own something else, appending an apostrophe-S usually does the trick. This is wrong, of course.

To keep yourself from ever making this mistake again, change the way you think about it. Don’t think about it like you think about most nouns (because it’s not a noun), think about it like a pronoun (which it is). It is just like he, she, or they. You don’t add an apostrophe-S to make these words possessive. You change forms. He becomes his, she becomes hers, they becomes theirs and it becomes its.

The only time its will appear, with that apostrophe in there, is if it’s a contraction of it and is.

So change the way you think about its. If you need a little trick, just remember: It’s that there’s no apostrophe in ownership