It’s a Crime
In my job as adult literacy adviser for the Los Angeles Unified School District, I read a variety of articles that appear in academic journals and on educational Web sites. Last week I was reading an article about reading assessment that was posted on www.sedl.org (the Web site of the Southwest Educational Developmental Laboratory).
I was amazed to come across this egregious error:
Linguistic knowledge is more than the sum of it’s parts….
It’s? With an apostrophe? Forget linguistic knowledge, let’s talk pronoun knowledge.
It’s is a contraction of it is (It’s time for supper) or it has (It’s been a long time). Its–no apostrophe–is the possessive pronoun (worth its weight in gold). The two words are never interchangeable.
This is a very common mistake and seems to occur mostly when it’s is used as a possessive. Here’s another example I saw a few years ago in the newsletter of a professional organization (I have files full of this stuff!):
The California School of Notary Public seeks to offer it’s notary public course at adult school campuses throughout the state.
And this, from a promotional flyer distributed by the teacher’s union:
UTLA has chosen Telincs Communications as it’s exclusive Internet service provider.
Why does this mistake pop up so frequently? Part of the problem may be that the words sound exactly alike–they’re homophones. The only difference in the spelling of the two words is the apostrophe. Not only that, we’re accustomed to using an apostrophe to indicate possession–the baby’s toy, the cat’s meow.
Misusing it’s and its should be a crime, punishable by 100 lashes with an apostrophe!