Contractions

“… a guy who’s service goes down every day …”

Common English Blunders, Contractions, Pronouns

I saw this on a blog yesterday.

Problem:
A contraction appears where a pronoun is required.

Explanation:
The full sentence was something like, “I work with a guy who’s service goes down every day for an hour and a half.”

The writer used W-H-O-apostrophe-S, which is a contraction of the word “who” plus the word “is”.

What he should have put was the pronoun “whose” — spelled W-H-O-S-E — which is the possessive case of the pronoun “who” — just as “his” is the possessive case of the pronoun “he”.

Solution:
“… a guy whose service goes down every day …”

“If ya’all could lay out…”

Contractions

I saw this in an email message.

Problem:
The contraction is improperly formed.

Explanation:
I saw “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader” on television last evening. A question was under the category of first-graded grammar, and it asked for the number of contractions in a particular sentence. The contestant — a working adult — got the answer wrong because, as he admitted, he did not know what a contraction was.

Sad!

Today, I saw an email message in which the contraction for “you all” — an American colloquial form of the plural second-person pronoun — was spelled Y-A-APOSTROPHE-A-L-L.

A contraction is correctly formed by replacing one or more letters with an apostrophe, not by replacing one or more letters with one or more other letters and an apostrophe.

The contraction of “you all” is spelled Y-APOSTROPHE-A-L-L.

Solution:
“If y’all could lay out…”

“Skype — social networking at it’s best”

Apostrophes, Common English Blunders, Contractions, Possessives, Pronouns

I got this in an email message from Skype a couple of days ago.

Problem:
A contraction-forming apostrophe appears where it should not.

Explanation:
The word “it’s” is a contraction of “it is”; the apostrophe signifies the dropping of a letter (the “i” in “is”).

The required word is “its” (not “it’s”) because “its” is the possessive form of “it” (which refers to “Skype”).

Confusing “it’s” and “its” is a common English blunder.

A simple way to remember that “its” is the possessive form of “it” — a third-person pronoun — is to recognize that “his” is the possessive form of “he” — another third-person pronoun — and that neither “his” nor “its” has a possessive apostrophe.

Solution:
“Skype — social networking at its best”