It’s/its
The most important thing to remember is that there is no such form as it’s’. Its is one of a few words that are already possessives, and do not, therefore, need an apostrophe adding to them. These words are
my/mine its
your/yours our/ours his their/theirs
her/hers whose
As we noted in the last passage, it’s is two words (‘it is’ or ‘it has’) contracted into one: it has nothing to do with the possessive. It’s is used in a large number of situations, but it is by far the best policy to avoid contractions (words such as can’t, don’t and won’t) in formal essays, as these are colloquial forms of the words and therefore not entirely appropriate. Some writers, it has to be said, disagree. There is, though, a further danger with contractions: if you forget to put the apostrophe in, for example, ‘can’t', you end up writing ‘cant’.
We hope by now, therefore, that you can see the sense of avoiding writing it’s and instead using it is whenever possible:
It is my dog and it has hurt its leg.
Disconnect, dissatisfaction and other ‘dis’, ‘mis’ and ‘un’ words
In tackling spelling questions, there are some things that you may have to learn by rote, but there are others that you can work out for yourself.
Sometimes it is a case of sounding out a word to you to remind yourself of how it is spelt. At other times, you may be able to work out how a word is formed. This particularly applies to words with dis at the beginning. If you add ‘dis-’ at the beginning of a word, it reverses the meaning, so like becomes dislike. If you connect something you can also disconnect something. There is no great spelling problem here until we come on to words such as ‘dissatisfaction’. You have added dis to satisfaction, so there are two s’s in the word. In the same way informed becomes misinformed, but if you misspell a word it has two s’s in it, because you have added mis to spell And unaware only has one ‘n’, because you have added ‘un’ to aware, but in unnecessary and unnoticed the ‘un’ is an addition to words that start with ‘n\ So, there are no strange tricks or bits of magic here: you add ‘dis’, ‘mis’ or ‘un’ to the existing word.
Separate, February
Why is it that some words are misspell by so many? These two are words that people get wrong over and over again. It is sep-ar-ate, not sep-er-ate. It is Feb-ru-ary, not Feb-u-ary. The only advice we have is learn them, but particularly ’separate’, perhaps by remembering the two ‘e’s are separated by two ‘a’s.
When the sound is ee, it’s i before e, except after c
English spelling is hard to become an expert at because it seems so unsystematic. There are, however, some rules that do apply, although the moment one spells out a rule someone will pop up and draw attention to all the words that do not conform to the rule. But ‘i before e, except after c’ is a useful one, because it relates to such a common misspelling in essays: the word receive. This is a case where ‘i before e except after c when the sound is ee’ applies. It is, of course, also a very catchy rule to commit to memory. We would, therefore, spell words where there is no c beforehand in the following manner:
Piece, grief, achieve, siege, shield, priest, mischief. But, as against these we would have:
conceit, conceive, deceive, deceiver, deceit, receipt, receive, receiver. But because there is no ee sound, you would have words like:
deign, reign, rein, weight, eight.
If we say these sound weird, it is only to draw attention to the fact that all words do not conform to the rule, but enough do to make it worth remembering – ‘i before e except after c when the sound is ee’.
Tags: few words, formal essays, Spelling