Grammar 101: You're and Your
Grammar 101: You're and Your
Previously:
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/phil1944/blog/feeling-youre-...
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/phil1944/blog/grammar-101-it...
A Few Simple Rules Are All You Need
There's no doubt that, in its entirety, English grammar is complex, especially for someone learning English as a second language.
But...
If you're a native English speaker and just want to avoid common grammatical errors in your writing (such as blog posts on your website) there are only a handful of rules that you need to memorize.
So this series of posts is for those who'd like to ditch the Grammarly crutch and just know what's right and what's not.
Here's the second one:
You're and Your
This one is actually very similar to it's and its.
One is an abbreviation and the other is a possessive.
All you really have to remember is that "you're" is an abbreviation of "you are".
So make that substitution, ask yourself the question "does it make sense?" and you'll get it right every time.
Some Examples
"You're the love of my life" expands to "You are the love of my life" and so is clearly correct and, equally obviously, "Your the love of my life" is not.
"Your face is that of an angel" is an example of the possessive. If you wrote "You're face is that of an angel", it would expand to "You are face is that of an angel" which doesn't make sense and so is incorrect.
So there you are. A simple rule to get it right.
Recent Comments
69
These are common mistakes that are made, Phil
Hopefully, this will help to reduce the confusion
Lol
I think it's because I teach students whose first language is not English.
They do struggle a lot
Yes, I'd be patient and understanding then as well. It's those who are deliberately dense that I might have issues with.
A simple rule to remember when to use the possessive or the abbreviated form. It's amazing how many confuse the two words. Since you are on a grammar series roll, have you thought of principal and principle? There's a lot of substitution between the two words.
"You're driving me insane with your awful grammar!"
I wish they still taught things in school, besides lies and Marxist narratives... It would save all of us over 40 a lot of deciphering time.
It actually would make sense to use an apostrophe in "Happiness is its own reward", being that it is possessive. Just sayin'. 😏 I only recently stopped doing that. :D
Another good example, Craig. And yes, I agree totally with teaching the basics of language and numeracy early on. The thing about "it's" is that you need different spellings for the possessive and the abbreviation and so it was decided to make an exception.
Another good example of exceptions to the rule! That's why I am glad I don't have to learn English. Unfortunately, it is the only language I know. I hope to learn another language at some point soon.
Thanks for doing this, Phil!
Barbara
Thanks, Barbara but while "its" for the possessive is an exception, "your" is not. It's simply the possessive form of you. And "you're" is a straight out abbreviation.
Thanks for clearing that up! I guess that I am really not all that great at English! I definitely was NEVER an English major!
I majored in Math and Computer Science. English was always my worst subject. True confession!
Thanks, Phil!
Barbara
I have a major in Physics with, naturally a high Math content and taught computer science when it was first making its way onto the curriculum and they needed people who'd actually worked with software in the real world.
But I've always liked English as well and have several books published on Amazon.
You have a broad set of interests! That's really great, Phil! Unfortunately, writing has always been pretty hard for me.
Barbara
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I've just finished inspecting one of my earliest posts using free Grammarly and it detected a bunch of errors.
I found one that I've written "your are" lolz... that won't get noticed by the site content's spell checker.
Although there are times that I don't agree with some of Grammarly's suggestions but most of the time I just go with its recommendations.
I've noticed Grammarly doesn't like the words such as "basically", "personally", and "my own" to name a few.
Now, I need to get serious about updating my old posts as I noticed Google has started indexing several of my very old posts.
Thanks Phil for these handy tips.
You're welcome, Rowe. I prefer my own knowledge of grammar over any software's. It often comes down to context.