I don’t know what I hate more: using AI to write, or people saying not to use em dashes because they appear in AI written copy.

Oh, commas. They should be easy to use – after all, their purpose is to reflect how we speak – and yet everywhere I look they’re being horribly abused.

I once knew an editor who refused to hire someone purely because he didn’t like their use of the serial comma – a punctuation mark so insidious, contentious and divisive that it even goes under several aliases (it's also known as the series, Harvard or, more commonly, the Oxford comma).

Writing needs to reflect speech – which is why punctuation marks that add pauses are so important.

If you find yourself swearing while figuring out when and where to use an apostrophe, you’re not alone.