I know it's small potatoes in the scope of the illiteracy crisis as a whole, but I'm seeing more and more people misuse "it's" and it's making me despair a bit. I'm not even talking about in casual communication, I've seen it in written works intended for public display, and it makes me so sad that people don't know or don't care or both.
For reference: "its" without an apostrophe is possessive. "It wanted its food". "It's" with an apostrophe is only correct as a shortening of "it is" or "it has". "It's hungry". I know the rules of orthography are silly and arbitrary and this one in particular is inconsistent with how other possessives are written, but however arbitrary the rules are, following them still conveys that you the writer care about your work and that you read other peoples'. Petty and pointless[1] rule violations suggest to the reader (and most strongly to exactly those readers who do the most reading) that not only do you not take pride in your work, but you don't engage with the wider art form you're trying to contribute to enough to understand its basic patterns.
Typos happen, and that's fine. I make them too! But when I'm writing something substantial or making art to put out into the world, I get people to proofread it so I can catch and fix them. You should too!
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There are definitely times when rules can be violated on purpose to make a point. Writing without capitals, especially in short-form text[2], conveys a certain informality and serves as a tone marker. Leaving out apostrophes altogether does this even moreso, evoking pre-autocorrect T9 text messages. But an incorrect "it's" doesn't really communicate anything other than sloppiness on the writer's part. ↩︎
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I've seen people do this in longer-form text as well but personally I find that it isn't worth the cost in poor legibility from lesser visual emphasis on sentence structure. Besides, a longer form work already conveys a degree of formality just from the mere fact that its length requires effort, so the pointed informality of lowercase can come off as pretentious. ↩︎