I mean, unless you're referring to something belonging to Cousin It, IT'S means IT IS

Cousin itt's name has a double 't'.

"It's" always means "it is"

learn something new every day

They just don't know the rule's.

As to your question. They never owned an Elements of Style.

However, I have noticed that texting sometimes auto corrects wrongly and adds apostrophes where they don't belong.

It was an occupational requirement.

Have you heard of The Elephants of Style? It's a short, humorous stylebook by John McIntyre, a long-time copy chief with the Baltimore Sun. He also wrote Lapsing Into a Comma, which I have. His humor helps you remember stuff.

I probably use TOO many commas myself. I'm officially old.

over the years, such as those that precede a quotation that doesn't begin a sentence. Essentially, I use most punctuation when it's needed to make the sentence clear or more clear (which is the reason I get into battles over the Oxford comma).

When it's necessary for clarity

I still have my paperback copy of Elements Of Style, and 2 brilliant books by the late Edwin Newman - Strictly Speaking and A Civil Tongue.

I first heard of it when I took an English writing course through a local college while in the AF. It helped me immensely when it came time for me to write performance reports, review performance reports, decorations, and awards at the squadron and group level.

...Kid's Dental. I often go by it when out walking for exercise because it is so close by. So far, I have resisted the temptation to stop in and snarkily ask them if they only have one patient. Obviously, neither the owner of the practice nor the sign company they hired knew it should be Kids'.

And pretty much every mailbox that has a family's last name on it does it wrong - The Brown's, The Smith's, The McGregor's, The Rialdi's, etc. Almost nobody seems knows how to make a plural possessive when the word already ends in an 's'.

"Uh... which kid?"

We don't see many mailboxes with names hereabouts, but there're a few welcome mats with the same thing. Also, I don't think it's grammatically incorrect, but names on mats or in text like "The Williamses" make my teeth itch. I'd spell that "The Williams'." Maybe I'm wrong, but it just looks... well, it makes me want to repeat the "-es" half a dozen times, kinda like Daffy Duck.

There's a fishing tackle shop around the corner from us with a neon sign in one window that reads "Fishing license's."

I've even heard Rachel Maddow do this!

tongue-in-cheek, as she does with several othher wordthings.

…ever getting the feeling that she was being snarky.

and generalize it to thinking any word that ends in an "s" should have an apostrophe before the "s"

Asparagu's for dinner?

You know what asparagu's doe's to your pis's.

… and I’m sad to say that this ignorance even includes “writers”—though I think it’s a stretch to call everyone with a book that. Self-pub has really decimated the book world because ANYone can publish a book, and many people think they can have ignorant family and friends read their “masterpiece,” declare it a wonder, and off they go to Amazon to have it foisted off on an unsuspecting public without paying a proper editor to proofread and make corrections, full of wrong homonyms (“but spellcheck says it’s spelled right!”), tenses that jump from past to present in the same sentence, ditto genders, characters, names, places, and OMFG, the punctuation drives me up the wall! It’s depressing.

The most common mistake I can’t believe I have to keep bitching about is that no one seems to grasp that you “wrack” your brain. They’re all putting them on shelves, apparently. Virtually everything that would have made my fifth-grade English teacher pull his hair out is happening out there. Seriously, being able to bypass a publishing house has done readers no favours.

Sadly, I read so much and can’t afford to be picky, so I subscribe to a couple book lists every day and take my chances on freebies. The biggest thing it’s taught me is that I’m not obligated to finish every book I start if ignorance is out of control. Once, I would have been uncomfortable bailing on something I’d started but I no longer feel obliged to finish a book that has me making notes (I use Goodreads) to bitch about something every other page. *sigh*

Here's another, altho slightly off topic. It took me the longest damn time to figure out what "walah/wallah" meant. I was seeing this word, if you can call it that, in a number of on-line posts, and it always had me scratching my head in total puzzlement.

It finally dawned on me that people who didn't know any better thought they were saying voila.

My French is very poor, but I do know how to pronounce voila and hearing “wallah” really grates on my ears.

And they make a lot of money from the people you describe.

All you need is a computer, a printer with a lot of on-board memory and a "full service" print shop, like Kinko's (I dunno if they do binding, though). Oh, and spell check and grammar check.

Voila! (Or ""wala," as I've seen it spelled many times.) You're a published authorl!

...so tightly I'm afraid I'll crack one - making a possessive out of the first person "I."

More and more I see this kind of construct - John and I's vacation, or Mary and I's car, or Mike and I's dog.

No, no, a thousand times nooooooooooo!!!!

I'se The B'y that builds the boat and
I'se The B'y that sails her and
I'se The B'y that catches the fish and
Brings 'em home to Liza

I’ll realize I didn’t put a comma after a phrase and rather than go back and put it in - I just say F it. I think same with apostrophes - it’s just punctuation laziness-

The more I post, the lazier I get with punctuation In fact, today I saw a name I posted that needed an apostrophe- but I didn’t correct it. Also, have a bad habit of using fewer periods & just keep using dashes.

You've got limited space, you're usually in a hurry because it feels like an oral conversation, and you're using only your thumbs on small keys. Plus, where you've got young people, you've got slang -- in this case, shortened words to accommodate the aforementioned.

Also (this'll sound curmudgeonly, but I stand by it), texts and other social media are most of what young people read anymore. So, they learn the mechanics of the written language partly from what they do read, and partly from what they hear. You can't learn spelling, grammar or punctuation from listening to other people talk. All you can learn is pronunciation, and that'll vary depending on whom you're listening to.

What bothers me is the not-needed-' for years/numbers, as in: (for 1970s) supposed to be '70s, not 70's.

70s for age.

But, yeah -- numbers get pretty abused in text. The general rule is spell out one through nine, but write 10 and up numerically. But there're exceptions to that, such as age, which usalways numeric ("He's 6 years old&quot .

Also, when did it become acceptable to omit the comma from numeric numbers of four figures or more, like "5000" instead of "5,000"?

And since I'm on this roll, you do 't need to wtite "dollars" after usin a dollar sign -- which goes first, as in "$50,000." And, with one million and up, it's "$1 million" because nobody wants to count all those zeroes, especially without commas separating each block of thousands ($10,000,000,000).

Readers pick up a ton of grammar, spelling, & just how language works & flows, better than nonreaders.

and there are legions in both categories ...
With another contingent moving up fast on the outside - whose honest opinion is - "DOESN'T MATTER!" ( and, "get over it!" )

A lame excuse that's never used in mathematics.

Beautiful instrument, btw.

This one sometimes makes me pause.

It's is a contraction meaning "It is."

Its is possessive as in "Its mine."

Too many time I've seen people misuse them.

…and I was laughing so hard I was crying from this one - a claim that someone had seen a sign at a yard sale describing a fastening device as “rat shit straps” instead of “ratchet.”

It’s been at least half an hour, and I’m still laughing.🤣

The crux of the biscuit
is the apostrophe.”
-Frank Zappa

For example, what possesses (pun intended) people to write 1980's, when referring to that decade. It's 1980s.

...and could totally relate.

It is .... it's.

is when there isn't even internal consistency in a sentence. "We have mangoes, orange's, sapodilla's, limes, and banana's for sale at the farmstand today."

Makes me want to ask them, "Why these and not those?" But, I doubt they know because there's no sense, no logic to it.

Because it requires 2 taps instead of one to add the apostrophe. Note don't above.(auto correct will do it in the body but not the title line)

At the time, most of them had a 'count' of 435 characters, which includes spaces and punctuation. IN order to fit more into that defined space, one had to start dropping the punctuation in order to get all the words in. Now, this was fine for that application, but what it did was create a complacency in people when it came to proper punctuation because people started using the same methodology for writing in the real world.

I feel that some of them now cannot figure out how to write correctly anymore because of this. It is also humorous to read about the job applicants who cannot spell or write worth a plugged nickel and yet they cannot understand why they are not getting the jobs.

this is about adding punctuation where it isn't necessary, i.e. to pluralize a noun.

They don't know how to use it. Mainly because they usually don't.

not paying attention in grade school maybe?