Grammar

•Use “s” for all singular possessive nouns, e.g., Chris’s, Katniss’s.

It’s a widely accepted standard that job titles (e.g., president, governor, editor-in-chief) should be capitalized when they directly precede a person’s name and lowercased when they do not: The pope visited New York, but Pope Francis gave blessings to New Yorkers

A collective noun, to be clear, is a noun that refers to something comprising a number of people or things—like the words family, group, duo, and team. Typically the verb that follows can be either singular or plural in form, depending on whether the individuals who make up the collective noun are acting together or separately.

Basically: Be conscious of not making assumptions.

1982 [the first recorded instance of the digital emoticon]

Bryan A. Garner’s Garner’s Modern English Usage, also known to many in the editing world as the bible

Use ing or an apostrophe + d to create the verb form of an all-capped abbreviation

•Do not use an apostrophe when a word is primarily descriptive rather than possessive: e.g., homeowners association, kids department, teachers college, writers room. [The word is acting more like an adjective than a possessive noun.]

two pretty straightforward examples: The duo is recording an album (they’re recording it as a unit), but The duo are going their separate ways (both members, as individual people, are planning to embark on different journeys;