[thelist] Grammar tips

[Jorah Lavin]

<tip type="grammar" author="Jorah">
Erica said:
its = possessive
it's = it is (contraction)
==================
The way I finally 'got' this was to remember that "his" and "hers" are 
possessives but don't get apostrophes, and "its" falls into the same class 
of word.

Another "it's" word... "it has been" becomes "it's been"  ...and I suspect 
other contractions exist, so a rule of thumb will be "if you could write it 
out in a long version, you can use an apostrophe."

</tip>

I hope this helps someone else as much as it helped me years ago...

I'll admit to being one of the grammar police.  It constantly surprises me 
that people who spend all day making sure that they are nesting their (') 
and (") marks, making sure that the case is correct on file names, and 
checking for valid markup, don't even TRY to edit their English... and yes, 
working together is a great idea... I ranted about it years ago in a former 
life: http://www.witchvox.com/fritz/jorahrant.html