Commonly misspelled words

[Alex Franke]

To my knowledge there is no situation in which its' would be correct. That implies a plural possessive (e.g., the Jones' house

Yeah, I agree on this one -- I think it implies that "it" is plural, and if you were going to use a plural form of "it" you'd probably just say "they" and end up with "their."

Strunk & White say to always add apostrophe+s to make a word that ends in an "S" possessive, e.g., the Jones's house, and that's the way I do it even though the apostrophe alone is accepted by many teachers and editors as being correct.)

I think style guides are all over the board on this one. Some say always add it (some of those make exceptions for some biblical names -- e.g. "Jesus's" just doesn't look right), others say don't add it, and still others say only add it if it's one syllable and take it away if it doesn't sound right.

...and then there's the whole problem with French names -- do you write "Albert Camus' book" which looks like it should be spoken "Albert Ca-MOO book," or would you write "Albert Camus's book" which might be spoken "Alber Ca-MOOs book?"

[JR]

Barron's pocket style guide calls out possessive as follows:

Add an apostrophe and and S for words which do not end in S.

Add an apostophe only for words which end in S. If the word ending in S is a proper noun with only one syallable, such as Jones or Stripes, add both the apostrophe and the S.

It has to be high up in the list of the most arcane rules in our great language.

A Brit once called me out for ending a sentence with a preposition, found in the first sentence of a paper I'd written. I wasn't familiar with the rule. It's not as important for Americans, and has even been officially deleted as a rule in British English recently. Some time after my embarassing prepositional pulctritude I began reading a lot about Winston Churchill. The great man of letters, fed up with his staff's (should that be a British plural?) mangling of syntax to avoid the dreaded dangling preposition, made this note in the margin, "This is just the sort of thing up with which I will not put!"

JR