Watch Your Words

Rod Decker offers a brief list of style manuals and writing guides which should prove extremely helpful to anyone in the midst of a research project (e.g., the dreaded dissertation). It's well worth a look.

He also offers an insight which I cannot echo strongly enough:

Sloppy writing is one of the scourges of the Internet, nearly equal to anonymous web sites/blogs/posts in detrimental effect—but that’s another subject! If you have something to say, it’s worth saying at least in grammatical English, but better yet, in good, clear English. If you want to be heard, write it well. There’s no excuse for sloppiness. If you don’t have time to proofread it and don’t care how it sounds, why should anyone else?

Bloggers, heed these wise words and proofread your posts and comments. Whenever I come across typos or other grammatical mistakes in the blogosphere, I find that it inevitably diminishes the authority of the writer (at least in my estimation). Take a few seconds and look over your writing before committing it to the vastness of the internet. And if you don't know how to say it correctly, perhaps you shouldn't be saying it at all.