There's things about writing in English that keep bugging me, and which I've never found satisfactory answers to. Should I write 'anymore' or 'any more'? The former sounds right but comes up as an incorrect spelling while the latter seems wrong but comes up right in spell-checkers. And what about making a contraction of 'there are'? Is it correct to write "there's", as in "There's a lot of objects here.", when the full version would be "There are a lot of objects here."? I've never come across "There're" used anywhere. And what about quotations? Is there only one way to do those, or is it a flexible system? I know that I should use a new paragraph for each change of speaker in a dialogue, but what about nesting quotations inside other sentences? Should it be "He said she said."? Or "He said she said"? Or something else?
1. use "anymore" when referring to time; use "any more" when referring to a quantity of anything else.
e.g. "i don't drive to work anymore." "is there any more cake?"
2. use there are. just sounds more formal, but it's correct, although it depends what you're writing - dialogue/speech written in colloquial form would be more likely to use "there's", if that's how the character speaks.
3. quotations are written thusly: "so, he said, 'wtf are you on about?' and so i decked him." if you use single quotation marks ('), then use double inside them: 'so he said, "wtf are you on about?" so i decked him."
4. punctuation goes inside the quotation marks, but there doesn't seem to be an absolute convention on this: my PhD director of studies does it the other way round, but that's how i teach it.
5. funnily enough, although strunk and white are american, i use (and recommend) their book for grammar, cos it's brilliant. and correct english. and inexpensive.
