Your, You're (Word Usage)

Your, You're

Very near the top of the list of common misuses is the pair "your" and "you're," and again, although we are taught the difference between the two from an early age, it seems like using the wrong one at the wrong time is an irresistible temptation few of us are able to resist. The reason for this temptation, as is the case for so many of the words we regularly misuse and confuse, has to do with the sound of the word, and our resultant failure to focus on different spellings for different purposes. There is another homonym for this word pair, "yore," which refers to the idea of a bygone age associated with no specific historical time and place. However, this term is seldom confused with the first two, likely because it is not often used, whereas the other two are very common. This common use is another reason we tend to confuse certain homonyms and not others, for if we use the words on a daily basis, we are more likely to mix them up than words we seldom see.

The word "your" is used to indicate the second person singular and plural possessive forms of the personal pronoun "you." This sounds somewhat complicated, but some example sentences make the point far more clear: "Your handbag is under the bench, and your suitcase is in the closet." Here, we can clearly see that "your" is always and only used to show a person's ownership of a given thing. It can be used to show possession of physical things, as it is in the above sentence, or abstract things, like thoughts or ideas, as in the following sentence: "Your plan looks good to me, but your intentions do not seem noble." Plans and intentions are not concrete things, but "your" is nonetheless used to show who is the source of these abstract entities. If you are writing a sentence which shows no ownership, "your" is not the form you want to use. If you have trouble with applying this word correctly, always ask yourself what is owned by whom in a given sentence. If this question can't be answered, "your" is not the right word.

"You're," on the other hand, has nothing to do with possession, even though it has an apostrophe, which is often an indicator of a possessive form, as in "Billy's baby," or "the dog's bone." In this case, the apostrophe is there as a place-holder for missing letters, which makes "you're" a contraction, similar to "they're" and "we're." The word "you're" is actually a short form for the words "you are," with the apostrophe taking the place of the space, as well as the "a" from "are." Apostrophes are often used for this purpose, and so it is important to remember that this little piece of punctuation is not just used for possession. Here is an example of "you're" used correctly several times in a sentence: "You're never going to get that job because you're too concerned about how much you're going to make, and you're not excited about the work itself." In each of the four uses of the word in this sentence, we can see that "you're" could be substituted by "you are," and the meaning of the sentence would be exactly the same. In fact, this is one of the best tests for differentiating between the two forms of the word; if you can replace it with "you are," you need to use the word "you're." If this replacement does not make sense, the "your" form is the appropriate one to use.