Editing Tip of the Day: Who's vs Whose

Apostrophes seem to be tripping everybody up lately. And it doesn't help that auto-correct tends to put them in the wrong place at least half the time. So let's talk about one we're seeing misused fairly often lately:
Whose vs Who's

Whose is ALWAYS possessive. It's always talking about who something belongs to.
For example:
Whose shoes are those?
Whose book is that?
Do you know whose laptop this is?

Who's is another way of writing who is or who was. Remember that in a contraction, an apostrophe always replaces at least one letter. (And apostrophes are only used to indicate possession with nouns, never with personal pronouns like its, hers, whose.)
For example:
Who's going to the baseball game?
Do you know who's driving tonight?
Can I ask who's read Rebecca's book?
In all these cases, you can look at those apostrophes and see that they are replacing missing letters. Who IS going, who IS driving, and who HAS read.

Remember, unless you're using an apostrophe with a noun to show possession, it stands in for a letter. So if you're unsure whether you need who's or whose, just stop and ask yourself:
Does this sentence make sense with WHO IS/WHO HAS? If the answer is yes, then you need an apostrophe to cover for those missing letters.

​And then double-check that your spellchecker or auto-correct didn't change your contractions behind your back!