Question Outside reference sources for grammar, usage, ...

and writing style. (It appears that the subject line will accept far fewer characters than the space allowed.)

One of my old standby reference sources is the Guide to Grammar and Writing sponsored by the Capital Community College Foundation:
cctc.commnet.edu/grammar/index.htm

It helpfully has separate sections on word and sentence level, paragraph level, and paper/document level topics, as well as a very detailed index.

I'd particularly like to point out the section on notoriously confusable words. One of the biggest issues (and toughest to solve) in the Whateley universe stories (including many of the original canon stories) is the problem of homophone/homonym/homograph errors, which are never picked up by standard spell/grammar checkers. This section also includes things like the difference between "allusion" and "illusion" and the horrible confusion on the use of the verbs "to lay" and "to lie."
cctc.commnet.edu/grammar/notorious/notorious_frames.htm

Yup, I have that one on my home page.

I use three usage guides more or less regularly: Garner's Modern American Usage, Mirriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage and Common Errors in English Usage . The first two I have in hardcopy on my bookshelf. I also hang out on hard-core linguistics sites, like Language Log and Lingua Franca. These are, of course, U.S. references, there are different standard references in Australia, Canada and Great Britain.

My opinion of The Toxic Little Book is spelled out in Welcome to Whitman.

If anyone is interested, the Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. (original version from early 1900's, not Strunk and White) is available as a free iBook (Apple's eBook format) on the Apple iBook store.

By the way, one recent article used the word "relieved" several times when it was supposed to be "relived".



When the spell checker says a word is misspelled:

Don't pick the first word that appears. That's how you get such gems as "There are no amethysts in foxholes". This would also cause such confusion as "relieved" versus "relived" above.

Don't assume that the word is actually misspelled. I have had the spelling checker inform me many times that a word is misspelled when it is actually correctly spelled but not in the spelling checker's dictionary.

Turn off autocorrect