If you use the written word – and that means almost everyone over the age of five – then punctuation is important to you. Get it wrong, and you can look like an illiterate fool.

But getting people interested in such a seemingly tedious topic isn’t easy. Lynne Truss, with her bestselling 2003 book Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The zero-tolerance approach to punctuation, used an amusingly harrumphing style to teach us how to confidently deploy the entire gamut of commas, semicolons, ellipses and so on.

With this little book – only 62 pages long – Simon Griffin has wisely decided to restrict his ambitions to just one punctuation mark – the often bewildering and maddening apostrophe. But in addition to using brevity, Griffin also cleverly incorporates the f-word into the title of his book, which is guaranteed to hook the attention of many people who might otherwise dozily dismiss this helpful little hardback guide. The f-word, however, appears not only in the title; the word ‘apostrophe’ in fact, never appears in the book without being preceded by the f-word.

It starts off easily enough with the use of apostrophes in contractions ( I’m watching X Factor) and simple possessives ( Ian Botham’s Twitter account), progressing into the trickier area of possessives for singular names ending in ‘s’ (Miley Cyrus’s father). Griffin then ventures into the murkier territory of using apostrophes in shared possession, before diving into the utterly flummoxing universe of attributive apostrophes (is it farmers market, farmer’s market or farmers’ market?). Griffin writes: ‘As cans of worms go, they don’t get much bigger and wormier than this.’

The irony of this book is that after you read it you’ll be much calmer, more confident and therefore far less inclined to feel the need to use the f-word to describe the apostrophe.

Reviewed by Tim Graham