From Booking Through Thursday:
Writing guides, grammar books, punctuation how-tos . . . do you read them? Not read them? How many writing books, grammar books, dictionaries–if any–do you have in your library?
I generally don’t read them. I used to read a fair amount of writing magazines in my younger days, but these days I just write.
For my day job, I have a copy of Diana Hacker’s Pocket Style Manual, as it’s the style we follow. I also have a Chicago Manual of Style, which I was introduced to during my days as a freelance copy editor and proofreader and which I still find useful in my own writing. I own a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, probably an edition or two out of date, and a Webster’s International Dictionary, which sits ignobly in the garage because it’s too damn big to keep anyplace else. I don’t think I’ve cracked it open in years, thanks to the Internet.
I don’t trust the gosh-darn wide world interwebs for anything! I like books.
Now, strictly speaking … there really ought to be a hyphen between ‘historical’ and ‘fiction’ in your blog head … just strictly speaking, in a sort of compound-adjectivally sort of a way, of course!
I’m with you, Susan, on “I just write.”
I have the easiest to use set of dictionaries, style manuals, etc. in the world though.. the Internet. With my lousy eyesight print versions just ain’t gonna do it. I like that I can go right to a word, a rule, whatever. I agree with Lesley to a point.. I enjoy Wikipedia but I take everything on it with an e-grain of salt.. But I figure the ppublishing companies that put their print materials online are going to make them trustworthy.
Nan Hawthorne
medieval-novels.com
Now with an alphabetical list of the hundreds of books in our catalog.