If you want a job, learn your it's and its When an email arrives with a misplaced apostrophe - "the government needs to change it's approach," or a similar abomination - I tend to discount everything that comes afterwards. I am not alone. Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit and Dozuki, two US technology companies, says he refuses to hire people for the same reason. "If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use "it's," then that's not a learning curve I'm comfortable with," he wrote in a Harvard Business Review blog. Some may object, not because they disagree with his sentiment but because his own sentence contains a split infinitive and ends with a preposition. There is nothing wrong with either, as the Oxford English Dictionary online guide makes clear. Why, then, does mixing up "it's" and "its" matter when it rarely causes confusion? Because, as Mr Wiens says, if you haven't learnt the difference by now, what else haven't you learnt? His companies provide online repair sites and technical manuals, so some of his staff need to be able to write. But he tests all potential recruits. "I've found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing - like stocking shelves or labelling parts," he says. His complaints about poor grammar are backed by the CBI, the UK's leading employers" organisation, which says that half of British companies are dissatisfied with the literacy of school-leavers. There are young people who succeed without bothering about apostrophes. Lady Gaga tells Twitter that, after her album Born This Way, she had never felt "so so connected to my fans, watching how its changed your lives." Twitter's writing rules are different, you may argue. With only 140 characters per message, why waste one on an apostrophe? But it is not just "it's" and "its." Mr Wiens pointed to the problem some jobseekers have distinguishing between "there," "their" and "they're" (he could also have pointed to "your" and "you're"), which leads many to think English is in danger. There is nothing new about that. In his fascinating 1991 book, Images of English: A Cultural History of the Language, Richard Bailey devoted five pages to a list of complaints about the degradation of English over hundreds of years. Among the alleged culprits were theatres (1665), translations (1755), newspapers (1867), "the great American advertising man" (1927), the cinema (1930), and television and computers (1986). These were not the only claimed reasons for decline. In 1712 one writer blamed "illiterate Court-Fops, half-witted-Poets and University-Boys," as well as women, who "do naturally discard the Consonants." But it is noticeable that many of the changes were blamed on business or entertainment innovations. Social media let writers reach large audiences - Lady Gaga has more than 30m Twitter followers - unedited and without the constraints of an editorial style book. It would be surprising if that did not result in changes to the way people write. Many language experts are relaxed about this. English has always changed. It is a permanent referendum. If enough people start regarding "its" as the contraction of "it is" and "it's" as the possessive, then that is what they will eventually become and everyone will write them that way, just as they now write "music" rather than "musick," which Samuel Johnson insisted was the correct spelling. These experts call themselves "descriptivists." They merely note how language is spoken and written. They point out that dictionaries are descriptive too. They pit themselves against "prescriptivists," the writers of grammar manuals and style guides, who lay down the rules of spelling and punctuation. I would like to suggest a third category: affectivists. The term already exists in art criticism, but I have conjured it out of Sir Ernest Gowers" book, The Complete Plain Words, which remains a superb guide to clear communication nearly 60 years after it was first published. The aim of writing, he said, should be to affect your readers in the way you wish them to be affected. "It's" and "its" may eventually change, but not while Mr Wiens or the members of the CBI are around. It is hard to get a job these days. If young people want one, they had better try to affect employers in the way they wish them to be affected. Learn the difference between "it's" and "its"; it's not that hard.