This is a free ecourse which was part of Suite101 University. This part of their site is being removed soon. I wanted to keep the ecourses available. There is a lot of information in the courses. It is a shame to lose a great resource.

Basic Grammar Skills

By Janet Blaylock

Introduction

This course is a basic grammar course that will help anyone who is interested in improving their punctuation, capitalization, and sentence structure. The exercises and tests will help increase your skills in these areas and help you to discover your weak areas as well as your strong areas. As a result of increasing your basic grammar skills, you will write more effectively. The list of reference books are for your information. They are not required for the course. I have found them valuable in understanding grammar. These books will also help you to learn how to write term papers and other papers that you are required to write if you attend a college to receive a degree in a specific field. …more

How tough are you on your own spelling, grammar, punctuation and typos? I think everyone should be watching for mistakes. Whether English is your first language or not, if you are using English you should be able to have basic skills. At the very least you should not be letting stuff get by that spellcheck would have caught. Spellcheck isn't perfect but it does know quite a bit. Why would anyone choose to ignore it or not use it at all?

I do think we are all going to have mistakes at some point, however. Unless you are an English major in university or a paid editor somewhere, we are all going to miss something somewhere. Do your best, use the tools at hand and proofread, self edit and get a friend to check it over now and then. Another person might catch something you don't realize you are missing.

How are you on proofreading your own writing? Are you your worst grammar Nazi nightmare or do you tend to be pretty casual about it all?

Quoted from Darice de Cuba posting to the 9Rules Blog:

I would like to note that I don’t like what they call grammar nazi’s. Mistakes happens all the time and unless you have an editor or two going over your posts you should not be too hard on yourself.

A blog about ampersands. So what you ask? & what you should say!

A scribal abbreviation for and. Derived from the Latin word “et.” I like the ampersand. I think it is often the most attractive character of them all. This blog is an attempt to give this humble ligature the respect it deserves.

Go forth and watch for & in your everyday. Take a photo and send it in to the Ampersand Blog.

Writing has rules, we know about grammar, spelling and punctuation. There are also genres of writing and each has it's own rules of style, theme and plot. Romance is always about a relationship, the words in between make up the story but the genre insists on a successful relationship between two people. Mysteries, have their rules about dastardly deeds and criminals caught in the end. Horror has bad creatures/ people who end up being slain by the hero. You get the idea.

If you write in one genre for awhile you can line up the basic plots alphabetically and just fill in the individual details like names and dates. It can become routine and you begin to wonder if a million monkeys typing at millions of computer keyboards could not, after all, come up with a best selling novel.

So, to get out of feeling like your own cliche, read other genres. Read fiction and non-fiction. Read news stories. Read recipes! Go to the library and pick a book at random. Read things that have nothing to do with your usual writing, other than the use of words and language. In reading other genres you can find ways to break out of your own cliched plot. Small things, as the basic elements are ingrained and expected. Still, if you can get around feeling like a robot writer, that's a good thing.

"Language is the only homeland." Czeslaw Milosz.