ShmoopTube

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Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by low energy waterspouts.

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Maybe they should try a more balanced diet.

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Check out the following passage...

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How would you correct this underlined segment from the passage, if at all?

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It's?

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And here are the potential answers...

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The correct answer will be the possessive form of the pronoun “it,”

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which is standing in for the noun “waterspout.”

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We know we need the possessive form of “it” because its main function in the sentence

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is to identify that the energy being lost belongs to the waterspout.

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Most times, all we have to do to make a word possessive is add an “apostrophe s.”

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However, we’d run into trouble if we did that for the word “it.”

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See, “it’s” spelled with an “apostrophe s" is a contraction for “it is.”

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If we’re ever unsure about which “its” to use, we just say the sentence out loud,

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and ask ourselves: would “it is” work in this sentence?

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Would we say, “the waterspout loses it is energy”? Would that work? No salami.

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Therefore, we’re sure the underlined portion is incorrect, and we can cross out (A).

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Side note: we bet if waterspouts ate more than frogs and fish,

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they’d have more energy to face the day.

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Having nixed choice (A), choice (C) is a cinch to eliminate as well.

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We know that “it’s” with an “apostrophe s” stands for “it is,” and we know that

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“it is” isn’t called for, right?

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Thus, we can cut option (C) without breaking a sweat.

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Which is probably more than we can say for these low energy waterspouts.

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Choice (D) is a no-brainer.

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“Its’” with an apostrophe after it doesn’t mean anything, so it has no place in the English language.

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The correct answer is (B) because somewhere along the way somebody decided that “its”

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with no apostrophe is the possessive form of the pronoun “it.”

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We wonder if that grammarian’s ghost is sad that nobody remembers his or her name.

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