After explaining who vs. that, I realized I’m still getting hung up on who’s versus whose. I like apostrophes to show ownership. Unfortunately, with these two the one with the apostrophe does not equal ownership.
Who’s is who is. Or who has. It does not show ownership.
Examples: Who’s at the door? (Who is at the door?)
Who’s leave? (Who is leaving?)
Whose is for ownership.
Examples: Whose sandwich is this?
Whose children are those?
Make sense now?
Affect is something that happens. My favorite grammarian, Grammar Girl lists affect as a verb and is means to influence.
Effect is a result and a noun.
One is a noun, the other is a verb. With that, I shouldn’t be able to mix this up anymore.
I find this fairly straight forward, yet I still trip up on it occasionally.
Sometime means eventually, an eventual future. Example: I will get to New York sometime next year. If you can substitute eventually and the sentence still makes sense, use sometime.
Some time means an unspecified amount of time. Example: I spent some time on the phone with her. In this instance, some is an adjective modifying time. If you can use another adjective and the sentence still makes sense use some time.
This is the same for other some words. Someday and some day.
Luckily for me a quick Google search helped me remember what I already knew and cleared away the confusion.
The simple answer is Who is for people. That is for objects.
The more complicated answer is addressed by my favorite Grammarian, Grammar Girl (post can be found here). She found that according to the Heritage Dictionary, “It is entirely acceptable to write either the man that wanted to talk to you, or the man who wanted to talk to you.”
Grammar Girl determined it is a bit of a grey area. “My guess is that most people who use who and that interchangeably do it because they don’t know the difference,” she wrote. “To me, using that when you are talking about a person makes them seem less than human.”
Something else I learned in her post, “whose, which is the possessive form of who, to refer to both people and things because English doesn’t have a possessive form of that. it’s fine to say, ‘The desk whose top is cluttered with grammar books,’ even though it is obviously ridiculous to say, ‘The desk who is made of cherry wood.’” I didn’t know that!
Bottom line: who is for people. That is for objects.