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This is not the same as the contraction ‘it’s’, which just means ‘it is.’įor example, one could write “John likes its red paint.” It would be incorrect, however, to write “John likes it’s red paint,” which, when the contraction is expanded, means the same as “John likes it is red paint.” Expanding the contraction, it obviously makes no sense. The word ‘its’ is possessive, showing ownership between something called the pronoun ‘it’ and another thing. Let’s get it straight now, once and for all. In the editing stage, most students still miss the contraction problem of ‘it is.’ This would get more eyeballs on my work and help catch those errors I just couldn’t see because I had lost objectivity. I think the warnings about plagiarism scare students off collaborative work.īut when I was an undergraduate, I worked at a student newspaper and we used to swap our papers with our co-worker students. Students tend to think they have to do everything alone. Create an editing group with your classmates In this section, I examine key tips and techniques to solve issues that I see coming up so often in my students’ writing. Take a writing/editing online course for punctuation (and other issues).Sometimes you need more than editing/proofreading.
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Check the readability stats of your document.Use a grammar/style plug-in like Grammarly.Create an editing group with your classmates.
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