Apostrophes are only ever used to indicate missing letters in a word. This includes the possessive apostrophe. Possession is denoted with ‘’s’ for nouns not ending in ‘s’ or ‘z’, and a single apostrophe is used otherwise.

For instance:
- Antony’s bowel problem
- Gabriel García Márquez’ book The Murderers’ Confessions
- Seamus’ brother Nathan

Compound nouns (or groups of nouns making a single concept) that indicate possession only require an apostrophe at the end of the terminal noun.

For instance: ‘I really enjoy Mills and Boom’s earlier works.’ or ‘My mother-in-law’s jawbone’.

Check for any exceptions to these rules that have crept in in specific instances (For instance: Earls Court, All Souls College).

Apostrophes may also be used to express lengths of time, but only where the apostrophe may be replaced by the word ‘of’ without altering the meaning.

For instance: ‘I gave him three weeks’ warning of our copy-edit deadline.’

Apostrophes should generally not be used to form any kind of contraction, such as ‘don’t’ or ‘wouldn’t’ unless it is in quotation. If an exception is required, contact an editor.

Brackets come in two usable types:

Parentheses ( ) can be used to provide short bits of non-defining information (i.e. where the sentence meaning is not altered by the removal of the bracketed phrase); they should not be used in place of commas or m-dashes to mark off a subordinate clause!

Square brackets [ ] are used to denote comments, corrections, references and translations, usually in quotations, made by subsequent authors or editors to aid comprehension out of context.

For instance:

- ‘I haven’t dun [sic] nuthin [sic] wrong!’
- ‘This is the chase: / I am gone for ever. [Exit, pursued by a bear]’

In both cases, punctuation should fall outside the brackets if the bracketed phrase is not designed to be a sentence in its own right.

For instance:
- ‘103% of adults in the UK cannot swim (which definitely is not a made-up fact).’
- ‘103% of factual examples in this guide are ridiculous. [This may be closer to the truth.]’

Bullet-point lists should not be used if at all possible; exceptions may be made in direct quotations. Such list items should end with semicolons (and a full stop for the final one) if they contain grammatically correct sentences.

Colons are used to link two subclauses where the second follows logically from the first, but cannot be used if there is no logical link.

For instance:

- ‘I woke up at 8:57: how could I be expected to arrive at my tute at 9am?’

Semicolons are used to link two related parts of a sentence so long as they could both stand alone as separate sentences and do not depend logically on one another.

For instance:
‘I hate Stephen’s because I am a Ramjas man; I hate Miranda because I am a human.’

Semicolons may also be used in place of commas to aid clarity in long lists where commas are already being used elsewhere.

For instance:
‘I visited Trinity College, Oxford; Trinity College, Cambridge; and Trinity College, Dublin; and detested the lot of them. [Note that an ‘oxford semicolon’ before a final ‘and’ in a list such as this is acceptable.]’

Commas should be used to demarcate subordinate clauses, introductory adverbs and adverbial phrases, except those, which refer to time.

For instance:
-‘Although it was getting late into the afternoon, I still had not left my bed.’ Note that this is actually a concessive clause, not a temporal one, so it needs a comma.
- ‘When it was dark, I finally got up and had a shower.’
- ‘My breakfast, eaten at 5pm, was surprisingly dissatisfying.’

Commas are often used to mark off non-defining information, i.e. information that would not alter the meaning of the sentence if removed.

For instance.:
- ‘The pile of plates, which had been left to fester since mid-Hilary, had acquired their own strain of mould.’ OR
- ‘The pile of plates which had been left to fester since mid-Hilary had acquired their own unique strain of mould.’ [But the pile left to fester since mid-Trinity had not yet.]

Both are correct, but differ in emphasis. Commas should also be used to separate multiple qualitative adjectives. If the adjectives are not qualitative (i.e. they cannot be changed by adding ‘most’ or ‘more’ to them) then do not add commas. For instance: ‘I hate big, fat bluebottles with their loud, incessant, merciless buzzing.’ Commas should not be used to join two sentences that do not have a coordinating conjunction (eg ‘but’, ‘and’, ‘yet’) or a subordinating conjunction (eg ‘although’, ‘except’, ‘while’). This is known as a comma splice and semicolons should be used instead. For instance: ‘I kissed a girl, and I liked it.’ becomes ‘I kissed a girl; I liked it.’ Commas should be used in lists except between the last two items, where ‘and’ is used. A comma before ‘and’ is known as the ‘Oxford comma’ and should be used when comprehension is aided by it. For instance: - ‘My only friends are a couple of trapped wasps, a magpie that sometimes defecates on my windowsill and my pet rock, Jarvis.’ - ‘My favourite movies are Dumb and Dumber, Batman and Robin, and Marley and Me.’