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I happened to be watching Cheers today and while the Frasier character makes me disgust myself, today, I felt his pain. He was teaching young Woody the basics of grammar; and who better to do so considering the actors name and so on.

I'm as guilty as the next man or woman (thank you Loretta) for being slack with the odd comma and stray apostrophe, but at least I do know how to use the damn things. So let's clear up a few rules of the writing game and in the process make the fings wot we write a little easy for to read for the peeps we send's them two.

Now then, this is not complicated. It's just a few basic rules to make a huge difference to your email recipients ability to understand what the f*ck you're going on about.

Apostrophes

OK, now this is easier than you may think. You DO need an apostrophe if you're using an 'S' to indicate that something belongs to someone (possessive). For example: 'Rich's car' and 'the dog's bollocks'. You need an apostrophe but no extra 'S' if the possessive already ends in 'S', for example: 'Thomas' sammich'.

Now, you DON'T need an apostrophe when you're talking about plurals. For example: 'three nipples' or 'a pair of fours'.

The only exception to this rule is with the words 'its". With 'its' you do the reverse. If you're adding an 'S' because it belongs to someone you don't use an apostrophe. If you're contracting 'it is', you do use an apostrophe, for example: 'it's a shame she's got a face like a bag of spanners, cause her personality is very pleasant'.

When knocking out a sentence, commas are used to indicate a pause. If you read your paragraph out loud, just put in a comma wherever you take a pause. If you have millions of commas in one paragraph, look to see where you can add full-stops instead. Lots of wee sentences are preferable to long 'orrible sentences.

We'll address colons and semi-colons at a later date, but for now that's about all you need to know to make your emails just that little less retarded.