never use â?oitâ?Tsâ? in legal writing

My students take a diagnostic test during Orientation that helps us identify their weaknesses in grammar and punctuation. Today I used the e-mail option of a popular course utility (which shall remain nameless) to send them my comments on the class's overall performance. Imagine my surprise when the e-mail authoring software turned apostrophes and quotation marks in my original sentences into this gibberish:

Finally, if you were one of the students who confused â?oitsâ? and â?oitâ?Ts,â? I urge you to make a special effort this year to tackle that problem. When you wish to refer to something that â?obelongs to it,â? use â?oits.â? It may help for you to resolve to never use the word â?oitâ?Tsâ? (the contraction for â?oit isâ?) in your legal writing. Formal legal writing does not use contractions, so guess what? If you cannot substitute â?oit isâ? for the â?oitâ?Tsâ? you wrote in your memo, you used the wrong word.

So even though one shouldn't write â?oitâ?Tsâ?, it is perfectly okay to mutter it under your breath!

(Did you guess that my advice dealt with "it's" and "its"?)

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