Unnecessary colons between verbs and their complements and between prepositions and their objects. It s or its for its . 9. Unnecessary apostrophes in plural words. Semicolons between subordinate clauses and independent clauses. Semicolons for colons.
Single quotation marks for double quotation marks.
Commas and periods outside rather than inside closing quotation marks. Hyphens for dashes. Both practices are correct as long as one or the other is followed consistently. For years, Americas employers have been saying that high school, and college graduates, even some MBA s lack the necessary writing skills to perform effectively on the job. In fact, she claims, Every writing theory of the past 30 years has come up with reasons why it s not necessary to teach grammar and style.