A style guide for writers can answer so many questions that haunt writers, be they amateurs or professionals, regardless of the attention they pay to grammatical detail. Perfect grammar does not make any piece of writing more powerful but bad grammar leaves a bad taste in readers’ mouths.

This short, two-part style guide focuses on the most common grammatical errors and if you recognize any of these points, do go back over your work using the Find feature in your word-processing program.

Let’s say, for example, that you are not quite certain about your use of a word such as ‘only’; have a look at the relevant section in this guide, open your work and use Find to search out every instance of the word. Check the way you have used it against this guide and, where necessary, change or even eliminate it.

This is by no means a complete guide to style and if I haven’t managed to answer your question, by all means, run a search on Google – somewhere, you will find the answer you need.

Let’s begin.

Apostrophe

The use of an apostrophe signifies one of two things.

First, it replaces a missing letter. For example: Don’t replaces do not, won’t replaces will not – this is the rule of possession.

Second, the use of 's indicates somebody who owns something, for example: Simon’s trainers are on the floor.

Unless you use its or it’s. Logically, the word ‘its’ should always be spelled with an apostrophe, i.e. ‘it’s’ but the English language is far from logical. If we follow the rule that an apostrophe replaces a missing letter, we would write something like “it’s not clever that we have this confusion”, which means, “it is not clever to have this confusion”. If we use the rule of possession, we would write, “the bird sang it’s song”, meaning that the bird has a song and it sang it.

Whoever wrote these rules clearly decided that, where ‘it’s’ is concerned, confusion could be avoided if the apostrophe were dropped in one of the cases. In that case, ‘its’ is the only word in the possession rule, ‘s’, that doesn’t have the apostrophe.

For example, we would write, ‘the bird sang its song’ not ‘the bird sang it’s song’.

Only

Technically speaking, ‘only’ may be either an adjective or an adverb. If you don’t know what the difference is, don’t worry. The important thing is that ‘only’, which is a modifier word, should be as near to the word it is modifying as possible. Stay with me, it will become clear.

Let’s try an example.

Let’s say that you are being questioned by the police about a crime that happened near you. When you explain your alibi, you say, “I only ran to the shop”. The detective is a bit slow and he only watches TV crimes on the television; he doesn’t read style guides. He is a bit confused and wonders if that means you ran – you didn't walk, jog, crawl, or anything else – or that you ran to the shop and not to a restaurant, the harbor, or anywhere else.

Tune in to part two for the answer to this!