Its and It's and other Errors in Student Writing: A Confrontational Approach.

Introduction

This short article attempts to provide ways of rectifying three problems that occur in all courses where writing is involved, problems which not only exasperate professors but which also, more importantly, repeatedly lower student grades. These are the familiar confusion between its and it's, the weakness of essay conclusions, and finally a quirky misspelling which has been causing all my colleagues great puzzlement.

Its/It's

Anyone who teaches English is, unless he or she possesses the deepest reservoirs of patience, at some time driven to distraction by student confusion of "its" and "it's." In the face of this growing problem nationwide, rhetorics, grammars, and handbooks remain outwardly calm and perfectly sensible while at the same time betraying symptoms of energetically nervous denial or strenuously wishful thinking. Many choose not to address the problem at all, preferring instead to instruct students in the possessive pronouns, among which "its" takes its place alongside "his" and "hers," as if no one ever misspelled it. Those books that do address the issue do so, in my view, sensibly insofar as they tacitly acknowledge that too prolix explanations would be unhelpful. For them, student difficulties with "its" and "it's" are a minor ailment which a note-length reassurance can clear up. The most tersely concise of those that I have found is the Harbrace Handbook with its yellow-highlighted admonition: "Do not confuse it's with its.... It's is a contraction for it is. Its is the possessive form of it" (Hodges 155). The case could not be put more pithily, but one senses Harbrace's authors, having put the matter in the clearest terms possible, sternly and pointedly leaving it at that: those capable of understanding will swim and those who do not will sink. Kinder is Reading-Based Writing, whose authors also throw out a note-sized life belt to the straggling, but hardly as if it is a difficulty which plagues students throughout their writing lives:

   Note: the contraction it's means "it is." The word its is only the
   possessive form of it. In fact, you do not use apostrophes with any of the
   possessive pronouns. (McDonald 320)

"Only," "In fact," and the gentle cajoling of "its" into the company of its fellow possessive pronouns are all means of seeking to reassure the student (and perhaps the writers themselves) that "its/it's" is a minor matter and certainly not a special case that has its perpetrators and would-be correctors pulling out their hair in tufts. The St. Martin's Handbook, on the other hand, faces the problem more openly, in the form of a suggestion that students can follow:

Editing for misuse of its and it's

?? Check each its. If it does not show possession, add an apostrophe before the s.

?? Check each it's. Does it mean "it is"? If not, remove the apostrophe. (Glenn 496)

I hope that my discussion does not sound harsh. It is, after all, very reasonable to try to dissolve a problem before it occurs and thus to allow "its" to glide anonymous, free from distracting distinctions from "it's," into the apostrophe-less company of "his" and "hers" and the other possessive pronouns. But to do so is to assume that students are tabulae rasae. Unfortunately they are not. When they arrive at college, they can write, but they do so in their own fashion, a fashion in which "it's" is habitually and unthinkingly used instead of "its," and vice versa. Much has ingrained this practice: Internet chat, CD sleeve notes, and, shockingly, high-school English teachers who themselves should know better but do not. At college, only those high-school teachers are absent, and the rest continue to thrive, spreading the error as a virus. And, to make an already critical situation a great deal worse, Windows 98 spellcheck itself perpetuates the blight, and we know the extent to which students depend on it.

Until recently I have never been able to find anything that works with "its" and "it's." All that the textbooks say is right, but they must be read silently and inwardly digested. I am afraid that most of my students possess neither the patience nor the resistance to panic to make sense of sentences beginning: "If it does not show possession . . ." Furthermore, despite the textbooks which would wish the matter otherwise, "it's" and "its" is a particular problem. It comes up with the return of the first essay, and, of course, students want to be corrected so that they can get it right from then on.

I have had success with the following approach. After asking the class whether there are problems with "its" and "it's," and invariably being told that there are, I announce that together we will clear the matter up for once and for all. I write "it's" on the board and ask what it means. On receiving the answer "it is," I add these two words to the board in the form of an equation: "it's = it is." Then I melodramatically tell the class to look at the "it's," for they are looking at it for the last time. Next, I robustly strike the word through with a firm cross and leave it, in silence, on the board for a few seconds. After that, I tell the class that this word is henceforth banned (the more emphatically this is done, the better the results). Finally, I erase both it and the equals sign so that only "it is" remains.

After as long a pause as I consider necessary, I say: "When you are writing your own essays or reading other people's essays in peer review, and you see "it's," draw a firm circle around it, for it has no place in this class!" (The italics indicate emphasis of delivery and the precise avoidance of the word "wrong.") Again employing emphasis, but this time for a different purpose, I explain: "There is a word "its" but it does not have an apostrophe, of course," and follow up by asking the class for a sentence in which this word figures. This elicited sentence I write on the board, allowing it to stand there, again in silence, thus letting its meaning be evident. By no means do I ever say that "its" means "belonging to it," because this is a reason why some students, the thoughtful ones, make the error in the first place.

Normally these steps will occupy part of one class session. In the next, I extend the technique, shorn of pyrotechnics, to all of the other contractions, and invite the class to decline formally the verb "to be." Thus "I'm" is discarded in favor of "I am," "you're" gives way to "you are" (eliminating the ever-more-common confusion with "your"), "we're" yields to "we are" (sidestepping the astonishing "we're/were" pattern of error), and so on, all the way to the replacing of "they're" with "they are" (which knocks off one prong of the troublesome "they're/there/their" trident).

A great benefit of this method is that it avoids the cluttering of the board with definitions and distinctions which can spread the very confusions they are designed to clear up, and which can easily drive students to despair of ever understanding. Secondly (or so it seems to me with my English background), it quietly encourages a formality of style which is appropriate not only to advanced college courses but also to students' careers in a working world where informality, however unintentional, has no place.

Weak Conclusions

Grave as the its/it's confusion is, it is at least a single error committed continually unless corrected, and incurring the same penalty each time. Weak conclusions, on the other hand, are much more ruinous because, rather than being mistakes, they result from a state of mind which gives rise, essay by essay, to swarms of fresh errors. Again, my argument is that due to the gap between what books recommend and the way that students think and write, a new approach is needed.

A survey of rhetorics' discussions of conclusions need not take long. The Harbrace Handbook speaks for most when it advocates that "A composition should not merely stop; it should finish" (Hodges 376) and then suggests that strong conclusions should not only rephrase the essay's thesis but should direct the reader's attention to larger issues, encourage readers to change their attitudes or alter their actions, should summarize the main points covered, and should somehow "clinch" the argument by reference back to the introduction.

Concurring, The St. Martin's Handbook also thinks that conclusions can be vivified with challenging questions and quotations, and it goes further. In a valuable and sympathetic section on "getting distance before revising," The St. Martin's Handbook authors empathize with student difficulties: "You have schedules to follow, deadlines to meet, examinations to take, graduation requirements to fulfill" (Glenn 55). These circumstances notwithstanding, the authors wisely observe that "Even putting the draft away for a day or two will help clear your mind and give you some distance from your writing" (Glenn 55). Nor does The St. Martin's Handbook advice end there, because there now comes the suggestion of a peer review with questions requiring more than yes/no answers, an example of which is: "Does the draft conclude in a memorable way, or does it seem to end abruptly or trail off into vagueness? If you like the conclusion, tell why. How else might it end" (Glenn 59).

But if The St. Martin's Handbook seeks to improve students' conclusions through empathy, others do so through rallying cries. Writing: A College Handbook, for example, urges students to "ask ... what final impression you want to make on the reader" (Heffernan 64). For its part The Allyn and Bacon Handbook waxes both ecstatic and portentous:

   ... often you will want to do more than write a summary. Provided you have
   written carefully and believe in what you have written, you have earned the
   right to expand on your paper's thesis in a conclusion: to point the reader
   back to the larger world and to suggest the significance of your ideas in
   that world (Rosen 163).

By now thoroughly worked up into transports of their own making, the Allyn and Bacon authors press on:

   A conclusion gives you the opportunity to answer a challenge that all
   readers will raise--So what? Why does this paper matter to me? A
   well-written conclusion will answer these questions and will leave readers
   with a trace of your thinking as they turn away from your paper and back to
   their own business (Rosen 163).

Surprisingly, out of all the books I surveyed, only one, The St. Martin's Handbook again, engages with what students actually do do rather than what they should do:

   Padded endings are common in student writing. Inexperienced writers may
   sometimes sense that the paper is finished, but lacking confidence in their
   own writing, may feel compelled to restate the thesis or summarize the
   entire essay (Glenn 65).

Given that students have this plethora of good and well-meaning advice at their disposal, why are the conclusions of their essays often so poor? Indeed, who among us is not acquainted with the fine essay, assured in argument and lucid in expression, which self-destructs with a feeble bedraggled final paragraph into which all the hitherto carefully-avoided errors crowd themselves? Is it possible that there is a step which textbooks have not thought of, one that (like its/it's) works by confronting students with how they actually write and which then works with them to improve their conclusions?

I believe that there is such a method and that to work towards it one need look no further than to the student essays themselves. Typically, when reading the final paragraph, one senses that the writer has lost interest in the essay and that the essay has lost interest in itself. Put bluntly, most students (even the best) have never thought of the conclusion other than as a formal final paragraph, a going-through-the-motions which repeats what has gone before. The overwhelming impression is of a curious melange of carelessness, listlessness, laboriousness and haste, of a wearied haul to get to the word minimum (as witnessed by the word-count numbers on rough drafts). If student writers see in the conclusion any opportunities at all, they are not the opportunities envisaged by Allyn and Bacon of "pointing the reader to the larger world." The only larger world is that which beckons the writer away from the computer screen, and as for the readers ... there are no readers. There is only the professor, and the conclusion is often written "to make the professor happy," the phrase which students themselves use and which implies the throwaway nature of the writing and its lack of serious authorial purpose. What ensues, then, is error-clotted padding which undermines the entire paper and rains the grade.

Plainly, a decisive strike is called for: a memorable attack which will shake students into realizing the damage that they are doing to themselves.

The attack is an unusual one, and can hardly be called an attack at all in its opening stages. For remedial English classes I will direct students, earnestly and seriously, to read and consider for themselves the conclusions section of the reader I am using for that class, before they submit their first full-length essay. I hope that I am sounding realistic rather than cynical when I admit in this article that I expect students in practice to do no such thing: their very inattentiveness, paradoxically, will be used later to help them. For literature survey courses (whose students will already have taken at least one writing class) I simply wait for the first essay to come in, and then I grade it. In both cases my assumption is the same, and it is almost always borne out: the essays' conclusions will be poor. This fact is not lost on the students themselves once they are handed their essays back, and I often hear them saying, in dismay: "I can't believe I did that!" But do it they did, and as I walk around the class helping with individual problems I will privately advise certain students, and then the whole class, to give hard and serious thought to conclusions before the next peer review.

Indeed, a combination of peer review and open discussion is the best way that I have found to tackle conclusions. It is very much part of a serious onslaught on a serious problem that the first essay has had to be sacrificed so that students can see through their own experience why conclusions matter as much as they do. The peer review session gets them thinking towards this truth. I have found it helpful and reassuring to start this "remedy session" with an overhead of an essay (from a previous year's class, of course) providing evidence a-plenty of the devastation that a writer can wreak on his or her essay by means of a slipshod or insubstantial conclusion. Temporarily empowered as professors or editors, students will gleefully swarm over all the obvious errors and can be encouraged, after a little talking among themselves in small groups, to make constructive suggestions. These steps put the class in a sturdy enough frame of mind to face their own shortcomings.

The next stage, the peer review, differs from most peer reviews. First, it is not dully headed "Essay 2: Peer Review" but bears the more rousing (and hopefully intriguing) clarion call of a title: "Improving Your Grades, Now and in the Future." The first question asks the students, paired off as usual: "What is the last part of an essay in a professor's mind before awarding the grade?" The answer to this is easy, of course. The second question is: "Why am I asking this question?", and students between them have to write at least four sentences in reply. (Professors, by the way, spend more and more time trying to think as their students think, but the opposite direction has its benefits, too.) The third question demands that students list as many other college courses as possible on which their previous answers have a bearing.

By this time, hopefully, the obvious points about a conclusion's importance, both in English classes and across the curriculum, are coming to the fore. Next, students read aloud their essays, twice, to their partner. Once they have done this, they are posed a question very much along the lines of that posed in The St. Martin's Handbook, which was as follows: "Does the draft conclude in a memorable way, or does it seem to end abruptly or trail off into vagueness? If you like the conclusion, say why. How else might it end?" The St. Martin's Handbook thus circumnavigates the yes/no answer which is meat and drink to the lazy or the indifferent, but, on the other hand, it is restrictively two-pronged in its first part, and I can well imagine students writing "Ended in a memorable way" either out of kindness or sloppiness. Similarly, to ask student readers why they liked the ending (if indeed they did) is neither to challenge them nor to have them suggesting improvements.

Instead, I ask: "Write down at least four ways of improving the conclusion," which is a far taller order, and one that has obvious advantages. What comes next, by contrast--and the presence of the reassuringly straightforward is part of this approach's psychological strength--is undemanding: "Does the conclusion somehow lack liveliness? Does it sound tired?" These two questions, provocatively and possibly irritatingly similar to the previous one, would seem to elicit the very thing The St. Martin's Handbook seeks to avoid: a yes/no answer. Here, though, the yes/no approach subtly leads to precisely what The St. Martin's Handbook does advocate, namely "Getting Distance Before Revising," for I follow up with: "Whatever answer you gave to the previous question, suggest in detail at least two ways of enlivening the conclusion. [Hint: how did you gather ideas for an essay before you even started writing it?]."

Students are thus encouraged, using their own minds rather than being told, to think of brainstorming as a means of vivifying the conclusion once the body of the essay has been written. When this point in the peer review is reached, discussion of the entire peer review can be opened. The student responses to all these questions are generally very valuable, not least those to the last question which elicits the value of letting a paper lie fallow to allow the writer to absorb ideas as they come to him or her, seemingly without effort, including those for the conclusion.

All of the above is exacting, and it may be that students cannot summon up as many different responses as each question asks. Against this, do not we all want our students to do as well as they can, and is not being demanding of them in their own best interests? It is in this spirit that I request at the end of the class session that peer review sheets be handed in to be graded with the completed essay. Finally, before thanking the class and dismissing students, I stress once more how important a matter the conclusion is, and state that from now on every peer review will have a section concentrating on conclusions.

A Quirky Misspelling: "a women"

The third error may be less familiar than the preceding two, but it is unarguably the most mystifying. No book mentions it. Over the past few years in north-east Ohio, students of all levels and in all classes have taken to writing "a women" instead of "a woman," to their own great bafflement and to the bewilderment of my colleagues. My suspicion is that this mistake is not regional; yesterday it cropped up in an e-mail I received from north Michigan. In my gloomiest moods I think that this error will assume epidemic proportions in five years' time.

I have found it a rewarding experience, as long as it is carried out in an amiable manner, to write on the board "a women" and ask students what they make of it. It is never long until I am informed, courteously or otherwise, that the spelling is wrong and how to correct it. I duly obey, and then good-naturedly add, "You are probably wondering why I am asking such an apparently idiotic and time-wasting question," which is exactly what my students are wondering. It is this aspect of novelty, a professor seeming to take leave of his or her senses, that not only seizes class members' attention at the time but has them remembering the issue later on.

Assuming that I have the class suitably intrigued, I use some overheads (always from a class of the previous semester or before) demonstrating that "a women" does get written, and often. I take pains at this stage to keep out of my voice any testiness hinting that my current students (least of all my female students), who are looking so askance at their professor, are the very students who have perpetrated this particular error. On the other hand, kindness, good humor, and particularly humor itself, work very well and help to make memorable the point which is being made.

It is rigorous test of students' imaginations to ask them why they think that the error "a women" happens. Typically when I do ask, no one will volunteer an answer. Then I will muse aloud "I wonder where the word "women" is seen most often in daily life?" and pause strategically until (hopefully) one class member, hardly believing that such an explanation can be correct or "what is wanted," will venture that the word appears on restroom doors. I think that it is a fruitful classroom strategy to allow the class a little time to consider this response and the surprising course of events that led up to it before I step in and agree--and let me make very clear that I believe that restroom doors are indeed the cause and that I cannot think of any other plausible explanation for so perplexing a slip.

But a cause is one thing, and effective teaching is very much another, so I will widen the in-class discussion by asking what this error might prove about the relationship between reading and spelling (and I stress at this point that the singular is "woman" and that "women" is most certainly its legitimate plural, a word in its own right, for I have known students to shun the word "women" as wrong from the moment that the matter has been raised). This question leads, via the curious instance of "a women," to the truth that spelling is helped by reading, that the brain unconsciously takes in the spelling of a word, and that the more one reads the better one will spell. Students themselves will admit to reading very little (and I suspect that they are reading less and less), but I simply do not know a good way of encouraging them to read more. The "women" error, though, can go some way in this direction because it gives students an opportunity to think for themselves about the practical importance of writing and self-presentation, and also, at one remove, of reading. To stimulate this train of thought, I reassuringly remind them that they all do know how to spell both "woman" and "women," and then inquire what impression the misspelling "a women" might give of its writer and where such a misspelling might have particularly serious consequences (I have a job application letter in mind, but answers may vary).

Of course, the mistake is likely to persist even after the class in which it is mentioned. In my comments on student papers I have jocularly written "restroom English" or even "Every time you go to the restroom, think about English." Furthermore I would, were I a better artist, accompany such comments with a drawing of a lavatory. These ploys may sound downright vulgar (and to my English upbringing they are indeed so), but, on the other hand, the error is both serious and unworthy--even the best students make it--and the more memorably and humorously the point is labored the greater the chances that students will be vigilant in avoiding it.

The most obvious objection to all of the above, of course, is that students never once write "a men," and does the word "men" not figure exactly the same number of times on restroom doors as "women" does? But "men" is of one syllable only and, for all that students see it daily, it is heard that way in the mind's ear during the writing process and hence "a men" does not get written. "Women," on the other hand, is disyllabic and is stressed on its first syllable. Students both writing on their own and then reading aloud in peer groups do not attend to the second syllable, and when they come to check each other's written papers and their own later, the word looks so familiar that they do not give it a second thought.

Conclusion

What this slight article has espoused is not that students exhaust themselves by straining to excel, but that by identifying errors and avoiding them they leave themselves free for the excelling to take care of itself, through experience of writing. This philosophy, if philosophy it can be called, can be put to students in terms of various maxims. In my chess-playing childhood I read of the Russian-Jewish grandmaster of the 1920s and 1930s, Savielly Tartakower, whose famous aphorism was: "The mistakes are all there, waiting to be made." (The considerably less poised imperative from this can be mouthed in three monosyllables.) But most of all, my students relish my account of being on a boat on a small lake near my friend Chris Dalheim's house in north-east Ohio. Chris asked my English friend Jane if she would like a mm at driving the boat. Obviously wanting to, but looking anxiously at the controls, she asked for his advice. "Miss the land," he replied. There is indeed a land. We should all of us, students and professors alike, try to miss the land.

Works Cited

Glenn, Cheryl, et al., eds. The St. Martin's Handbook (Annotated Instructor's Edition). New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.

Heffernan, James A. W., and John E. Lincoln, eds. Writing: A College Handbook (Annotated Instructor's Edition). New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.

Hodges, John C., et al., eds. Harbrace College Handbook. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1994.

Kirkland, James W., and Collett B. Dilworth, Jr., eds. Concise English Handbook. Lexington: D. C. Heath and Company, 1985.

McDonald, Stephen, and William Salome, eds. Reading-Based Writing. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1996.

Rosen, Leonard J., and Laurence Behrens, eds. The Allyn & Bacon Handbook. Needham Heights: Allyn and Bacon, 1992.