I can never remember the rules regarding the its/it’s. Can someone fill me in please?
** His, hers, its. No mark
** It is -> it’s needs a contraction mark.
The bird sits on its nest.
Bleah. English. So messy.
I say “it’s” (the contraction) should be deprecated, and the use of “its” for the posessive changed to “it’s.”
If only English was as consistent as computer code.
Well, not Perl code…
Yep, that makes it simple all right.
Oh thank you, thank you lunasea!! Thank you for caring enough to want to know the difference!
As a technical writer, I cringe every time I see misuse of the two words. To me, I see it as a sign of illiteracy. That’s really tough for me to swallow, when I see the words used incorrectly by people whom I believe are intelligent and educated.
So thank you!!
Baglady pulls out a nesting bird out of her bag to give to lunasea.
Wood Thrush: That is perfect, I’ll never forget again. Too bad my teachers ever suggested something that simple.
Baglady: I know, and I’ve been doing it wrong for years too. I get it right from now on, just for you. 
I will get it right. Darn!!!
never suggested
::walks away quickly muttering to herself “use the preview idiot”::
We’ve been through this before:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=32412
It is consistent. The possessives of pronouns do not have apostrophes. His, hers, its. Simple.
And Perl is very conssitent if you write it correctly. (There are a LOT of bas Perl programmers out there, mostly because Perl lets you be bad. 
)
Ok, but why the possesives of pronouns, but not nouns? That’s consistent in the same fashion as Perl, which has a bunch of special case rules to give you that rope to hang youself with.
The more common the word, the more resistant it is to generalized grammar rules - like “add 's to make possessive.” Pronouns are more common than nouns and so are less likely to follow generalized rules.
I never understood why this is difficult. Just substitute it is for it’s and if the sentence makes sense use it’s, if not use its
Example: The bird ate it is dinner. That makes no sense so use its not it’s.