You're Judged on Your Grammar

A guide to the very common grammar error: confusing your and you’re.

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A very common grammar error in written English is mixing up your and you’re. Get that wrong and you stand out as sloppy, ill-educated or just plain illiterate. So here’s a brief guide to getting it right.

You’re is short for ‘you are.’ If you can replace the your / you’re in the sentence with ‘you are’ and it still makes sense, then use you’re.

Your is a possessive adjective showing that the item it comes before belongs to you.

A brief example:

Should you write "is that your car?" or "is that you're car?"?

The intention is to ask the reader whether the car belongs to them so use the first. The second actually means "is that you are car?" which doesn’t make any sense. Not even if you actually are a car!

To recap:

you’re = you are

your = belonging to you

And to help you remember, just think of the title of this article:
You’re judged on your grammar = You are judged on the grammar belonging to (used by) you

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This short article was first posted on Writinghood (in a slightly different form), here.