4.9 Possessive Determiners, Contractions, and Confusable Adverbs

A Small Skill With Outsized Frequency

Possessive determiners: The student will recognize and correct cases in which possessive determiners (its, your, their), contractions (it's, you're, they're), and adverbs (there) are confused with each other.

This is one of the most narrowly scoped skills in the whole Writing blueprint. It requires no judgment — only a mechanical test correctly applied, which makes it one of the few places on the Writing test where a correct answer is fully deterministic rather than a matter of rhetorical judgment.

The Governing Rule

Possessive pronouns and determiners never take an apostrophe.

This feels inconsistent because possessive nouns do take apostrophes — the dog's collar. But possessive pronouns never do. Hers, ours, yours, and theirs are already possessive; adding an apostrophe produces forms that do not exist in English.

The Expansion Test

One test resolves every item in this category:

Read the sentence with the contraction fully expanded. If it makes sense, the apostrophe form is correct. If not, use the possessive.

The committee published its/it's findings. Expand: The committee published it is findings. → nonsense. Therefore: its ✓

Its/It's the third revision this quarter. Expand: It is the third revision this quarter. → correct. Therefore: It's ✓

The test never fails. Apply it every time rather than relying on feel.

It's Has Two Expansions

Remember that it's can also mean it has:

✓ It's been three weeks since the last inspection. (it has been)

So when it is produces nonsense, try it has before concluding the possessive is correct.

The There / Their / They're Set

This trio is the only one with three members, because it adds an adverb.

Working tests:

• they're → expand to they are.
• their → must be followed by a noun it modifies. Their files, their decision. If no noun follows, it is wrong.
• there → everything else: location, or the expletive opening (There is, There are).

✓ There are two reasons they're revising their proposal.

All three in one sentence, each verifiable: There opens an expletive construction; they're expands to they are; their modifies proposal.

The Whose / Who's Pair

Less frequent but tested, and the expansion test applies unchanged:

✓ The engineer whose report we reviewed has retired. (who is report → nonsense, so possessive) ✓ The engineer who's presenting has retired. (who is presenting → correct)

Whose can refer to things as well as people: a proposal whose budget exceeded the cap is standard English, and the alternative of which the budget is stiff.

Related Confusions the Same Test Catches

Your / You're

✓ Submit your application by Friday. (you are application → nonsense) ✓ You're required to submit by Friday. (you are required → correct)

Its' — does not exist. There is no such word in English. If an answer choice offers it, eliminate immediately.

Lets / Let's

✓ The policy lets students defer enrollment. (verb) ✓ Let's review the policy. (let us)

Why This Skill Is Worth Deliberate Practice

These errors survive proofreading better than almost any others, for two reasons. First, the words are homophones, so reading aloud does not expose them. Second, spell-checkers accept all of them, since each is a real word. The only reliable defense is the mechanical expansion test applied consciously.

On the test, treat any underlined its, it's, their, there, they're, your, you're, whose, or who's as an automatic prompt to expand and check — a two-second operation that converts a guess into a certainty.

Where This Skill Sits in the Blueprint

Possessive determiners is the first named skill under Conventions of Usage, one of the three categories that make up the Standard English Conventions cluster. College Board publishes Writing question counts only at the cluster level: Standard English Conventions accounts for 9 to 11 of the 25 questions, or 36 to 44 percent of the test. It does not publish a per-skill count, so treat any source that promises you a fixed number of apostrophe items as guessing. What the specification does establish is that this skill sits in the pool that every adaptive form draws from.

How the Skill Appears in a Passage Set

Every Writing question is set-based. There are no standalone sentences on this test: you read a commissioned passage of 300 to 350 standard words — a "standard word" being six characters — running to roughly 12 to 16 sentences, and you answer questions keyed to portions of it. Your task on each item is to choose the best revision or editing decision, or to decide that the passage was already correct as originally presented.

That last possibility matters more here than almost anywhere else in the Conventions cluster. A homophone item frequently arrives with the correct form already in place, and the three alternatives exist only to make you doubt it. If the expansion test confirms the original, leave it alone. Points are lost on this skill about as often by "fixing" a correct its as by missing a wrong one.

Work every such item the same way:

1. Locate the underlined or numbered word.
2. Identify which family it belongs to: it, you, they, or who.
3. Expand the contraction form silently.
4. If the expansion is grammatical in that sentence, the apostrophe form wins; if it is nonsense, the possessive wins.
5. Check your conclusion against the original wording before selecting an answer.

A Worked Passage Item

… the archive digitized every negative in its collection last spring. Their condition had deteriorated badly, and there was no realistic prospect of restoring the originals.

Three forms, three independent checks. For its collection, expanding to it is collection fails, so the possessive is correct. For their condition, expanding to they are condition fails and a noun follows, so the possessive determiner is correct. For there was, this is the expletive construction rather than a possessive or a contraction, so the adverb is correct. Every one of the three is right as written, and the correct response to each item is to make no change.

Usage Versus Punctuation: A Boundary Worth Knowing

This skill belongs to Conventions of Usage, not Conventions of Punctuation. The apostrophe rules for possessive nouns — the chemist's lab, the chemists' lab, the children's toys — belong to the separate Possessive nouns and pronouns skill, treated in Section 4.12. The division is worth holding onto: this section governs a closed set of pronoun and adverb homophones that never take an apostrophe in their possessive form, while 4.12 governs where an apostrophe lands on an ordinary noun and how to tell a possessive form from a plural one.