Possessive

Possessive case can be somewhat confusing. Sometimes an apostrophe is required, and sometimes one is not. Some possessive case words are homophones, which can lead to confusion about which form of the word is correct. Whose/who’s, and their/there/they’re, are two examples of these homophones. For this reason, it is also important to recognize what a contraction is and what contractions mean. For example, who’s is a contraction for “who is”. If you said “Who’s glass of milk is on the table?”, it would not make any sense. It would be as though you said, “who is glass of milk…” This is a dangerous grammatical mistake, perhaps because it is not easily noticeable. You may be reading the mistake and not even catch it because it sounds the exact same as the correct word. Mistakenly using there instead of their might be even more unnoticeable because neither word is a contraction and both sound the same. In fact, I find myself using the wrong world fairly often, but I usually am able to catch myself.

Another tidbit I learned about possessives is that an apostrophe is not used with personal pronouns. Some indefinite pronouns do use an apostrophe. This looks like just another one of the many detailed rules to grammar.

The grammatical mistake I found this work is yet another homophone. A restaurant marquee using the world "then" when it should be "than". Their marquee said "choose a side more then just fries". It seems like I come across this mistake almost every day.