Dealing with contractions.

No, this is not about going into labor and has nothing to do with babies, but it can be painful at times all the same.

Maybe I could help with a few very common mistakes in the English language.

A few people seem to have trouble with contractions and their meaning. Let me give you some examples of what I have in mind:

It's or its? Well when you use one of those in a sentence, reread the sentence out loud and if you can replace this with "it is", you need a contraction and will use "it's". The apostrophe indicates missing letters. Ex: It's Tim's toy. (It is Tim's toy). When it is a possessive, leave as "its" Ex: Remembering how a contraction is made is its own reward!

You're also encouraged to know the difference between "your and you're". See what I did there? Which one is the contraction? An example might be: Make sure you're taking your place in the world. I this example, you can reread the sentence by replacing "you're" with "you are" but cannot do it with your place in the world. It would sound rather silly to say: Make sure you are taking you are place in the world. It's all in the proof reading. Just take a little time to clean it up makes a big difference to your audience.

Basically, when you want to use a contraction, make sure it flows in the sentence. If in doubt, leave it out and use the long word form, a little more formal but proper!

I hope this helps to alleviate the steady barrage of poorly employed grammar components and is not intended to be preachy in any capacity whatsoever.

Thanks for taking the time to read this blog!

Linda