50 Resources to Help You Write Better

Interested in becoming a better writer?

Check out these 50 useful and practical tools and resources that will help you to improve your writing skills, from Smashing Magazine. You will find copywriting blogs, dictionaries, references, teaching classes, articles, tools as well as related articles from other blogs.

Also, see how you can Write Better with Microsoft Word Readability Statistics, and how you can Write Better Emails.

Write Better Emails

Here is some excellent advice on how to write better emails, from David Silverman of Harvard Business.

Though some of his advice might seem a little obsessive – revise 30 to 50 times on an organization-wide email – practicing his 10 steps will make you write more clearly and more efficiently.

Also, check out our previous post Write Better with Microsoft Word Readability Statistics.

[via Lifehacker]

New MLA Handbook Recognizes the Ascent of Electronic Information

The Modern Language Association has just released the 7th edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. This style manual – now over 50 years old – gives step-by-step advice on writing research papers to millions of college and university students across the United States. A large part of the Handbook focuses on correctly citing your references, so that anyone can find the information that you use in your writing.

This edition of the Handbook has finally been adapted to the electronic age. (The 6th edition was released in 2003.) As such, it is an attempt to really make sense of how we find information on the Internet.

For instance, the MLA no longer recognizes print as the default medium of information, and suggests that the medium of publication should be included in each citation.

In addition, the Association has stopped recommending that URLs be included in citations, saying that URLs have:

“limited value… for they often change, can be specific to a subscriber or a session of use, and can be so long and complex that typing them into a browser is cumbersome and prone to transcription errors. Readers are now more likely to find resources on the Web by searching for titles and authors' names than by typing URLs.

The MLA has published an online complement to the paper Handbook. Oddly, you cannot purchase access to the web version without first buying a paper copy. “We still think instructors will want their students to have a physical book,” said Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the MLA.

I guess some old habits die hard.

The MLA Handbook, 7th edition, is available here.

[via Inside Higher Ed]

Using Excel to Write a Short Story

A while back, The Tech Desk staffer Mary Hojnacki wrote about using using Microsoft Excel to make a music video.

Now, here is one one blogger's attempt to write a short novel using the same software.

Excel: it's not just for spreadsheets anymore.

[via boingboing]