One job, one test. If the words before it do not form a complete sentence, the colon is in the wrong place.

American and British English disagree, and the American rule was invented for the convenience of typesetters rather than for logic.

Nobody struggles with the dog’s bone. The trouble is plurals, names ending in s, and the one case where the apostrophe should not be there at all.

They look similar and do entirely different things. Two of them most people have never deliberately typed.

Two uses, both simple. The reason people avoid it is that nobody explains which one they are looking at.

It is a Latin plural, English has stopped treating it as one, and the only genuinely wrong answer is changing your mind halfway through a document.

There is a rule, it takes ten seconds to apply, and there are three situations where following it will make you sound worse.

Chaucer used it. Shakespeare used it. The objection arrived in the eighteenth century, and the alternatives have all failed.

Nice meant foolish. Awful meant awe-inspiring. Decimate meant to kill one in ten. Some of these reversals are finished and some are happening now.

Dickens did it. So did Joyce, Twain and Fitzgerald. The complaint is younger than the usage it complains about.