Dear folks,
It is not typical for me to address our community folks to directly, but when I learned that the Oxford English Dictionary had a Web site (also spelled web-site, website, and web site!), I had to share my excitement.
As all online students know already, excellent written communication skills are a must to excel in the classroom. E-mails, discussion boards, live chats, and essays require strong grammatical and spelling skills. I learned a long time ago that Microsoft Word's Spell Check feature is rather weak. Over the years, my lackadaisical editing prevented a lot of good grades.
Recently I have been using Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster.com to check the spelling of my writing.
Just yesterday, however, I was reading The New York Times Magazine—from May 11, I'm a little behind in my periodicals—and came across an article titled Lexicographical Longing. The author of the piece, Virginia Heffernan hits home:
"But there's another virtue to a dictionary, online or otherwise: guidance in the finer points of usage. Subtly alerting readers to which words might suit them, and which they shouldn't try at home, is not only in the original charter for the O.E.D.; it is also a service with new relevance for people who use e-mail, blogs and message boards. On the Internet, idioms, dialects, jargons and languages from around the world collide. Corresponding with people of varying degrees of literacy in competing dialects of disparate languages means that we must commit most of linguistic resources to getting up to speed in the rapidly evolving lingua franca."
New members can register by paying a lump sum of US$295.00 for a year's subscription. The annual fee was more than I was willing to part with at once, so I opted for the montly fee of US$30.00.
Visit OED.com to see what all the fuss is about. Happy editing!
Sincerely,
Victoria