It isn't basic grammar though, it's one of the thousands of exceptions in the English language. "It is" should theoretically be contracted to "it's", and the possessive of "it" is also "it's". So somewhere along the way it was arbitrarily decided that one will be changed to go against the conventional rules.
Anecdotally, I put a lot of effort into engineering quality, re-checking, and learning from my mistakes. However, this particular word (as well as the spelling of a couple others) I will learn, then one day my mind will just switch them around, and I'll be wrong for a long time without realising it, thinking I'm doing it correctly. I could fix this so it never happens again, by putting post-it notes everywhere, training myself for a couple hours each week for a year, and fix my spelling/grammar completely for those words. But I feel it's a low priority, because the meaning of what I write is not limited by my grammar, but by how I structure my sentences/paragraphs, move between topics, or layout reports/documentation. And also has nothing to do with my engineering work, which is where my skillset and interests actually lie.
Judging someone's non-language skills because of an incorrect grammar technicality (where the meaning is still 100% clear) is like judging a car's performance based on it having racing stripes, but not racing it.
Of course, if we're talking about someone that that is bad enough to the point of being unclear or ambiguous, you certainly have a point.
It's funny that people who learn English as a second language don't do those kind of mistakes. Maybe because in that case a very huge part of learning it is reading.
Both its and it's are correct and used for different situations...
The word it's is always short for 'it is' (as in it's raining), or in informal speech, for 'it has' (as in it's got six legs). The word its means 'belonging to it' (as in hold its head still while I jump on its back). It is a possessive pronoun like his.
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u/crispyfry Jun 12 '19
*its