It’s just three letters (with or without an apostrophe). It’s one way of saying “it is.” “Its” is a simple possessive of a pronoun. It’s also one of the biggest grammar errors according to the Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation. To quickly check which word you should use, replace your version of the three…
My boss and I recently debated the proper use of the apostrophe when the word you’re adding it to ends in “-s” or “-es” (for the record, his last name ends in -es). To my surprise, I was unable to find a single resource willing to make a definitive statement on this. As we touched…
A classic sales tactic is to create a promotion that gives potential customers an incentive to buy. Almost every advertisement for a new car includes incentives for trading in your old one, or having the dealership do your taxes and double your refund to use as your down payment. One highly-publicized example of “incentive marketing” was…
The first stage of any concept is rarely pretty. Staring at a blank canvas at the start of a writing or creative project is daunting, and the first attempts at clarifying the scope of what you’re trying to accomplish and how you’re going to get there usually end up in the trash or wiped off a…
“Don’t use 10 words if you can say it in five.” This is one of the most common writing tips I come across while I’m researching grammar rules. Oddly enough, we were all taught to practice the exact opposite in school. Remember writing papers that were required to be at least 1,000 words or 10…
A few weeks ago, my hometown high school football team faced a minor controversy that was featured in the news. During an away game, they had allegedly trashed the locker room at the opposing school’s facility. The article, posted late one evening on a regional news site, was the official statement from my hometown school…
Which is correct? To say that I write a blog post for Grammar Hammer each week or to say that I write a post for Grammar Hammer every week? “Every” is used to talk about how often something happens. If I say I write something on a weekly basis, I’m saying I write something “every…
