The ESL HELP! Desk

Commonly Confused:  who's, whose

 

What's wrong with this sentence?

I have a friend who's mother worked full-time and never paid any attention to his schoolwork. 

Here we continue with our unit on possessives.

Possessive adjectives are commonly confused with other words and word forms.  In this lesson, we will help you to distinguish between a possessive adjective and these other forms.

This will help you with your reading comprehension and with your writing.

Commonly Confused:  who's, whose

 

The words who's and whose are often confused with each other because they sound so similar. 

Let's first answer the question to define our terms: What is a contraction? A contraction is a word that is formed when two words combine by eliminating a letter and using an apostrophe in place of the dropped letter.  

One common contraction is "who's". In writing, the contraction who's is often confused with the possessive relative pronoun whose.

• who's is a pronoun and verb contraction formed by combining the indefinite subject pronoun who and the 2nd person singular form of the "be" verb, and replacing the "i" of "is" with an apostophe:  who + is = who's
  
  Who's here?

• whose is a possessive relative pronoun.
  
  People who live in the city have their own problems.

Next... Unit Review

 

In our next lesson, we begin our possessives unit review: Editing Practice 1.

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