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Some may consider literature majors such as myself to be anomalies on the Internet. I like capitalizing the first letter of every sentence I write and lovingly punctuating the end of each with the appropriate marking. I check tenses and subject/verb agreement as if my life depended on it. I weep silently for each usage of “ur”, “teh”, and the morally unjustifiable “rite”. I attack “their/there/they’re" confusion with religious fervor, and I don’t think I need to tell you that I’m writing this in Word with the spell-checker enabled. And grammar-check. And Webster’s latest unabridged edition is on my desk. And a thesaurus. Stop looking at me like that.

Oh sure, some people get defensive when I tweak their pronouns, but they’re not looking at the big picture. Thousands of years from now, a future society may unearth documents from our time. What will their handful of underpaid translators of our dead language think? Will they guffaw at our grammar? Snicker at our semicolons? Out-and-out CHUCKLE at our … uh … word CHOICE!? I say nay, because “nay” sounds more sophisticated than “no”. But I also say it because with a few tools, even the most syntactically stunted can achieve prose perfection.

The Sharp PW-E550 Electronic dictionary
http://www.sharpusa.com/products/ModelLanding/0,1058,1395,00.html

This device has been most useful in preventing me from looking like the idiot I am. I keep it on my computer desk at all times. For example, a person might opine, “In DaugWok’s latest article, he has clearly reached the nadir of his writing career.” Without my PW-E550, I might start running victory laps around my house in celebration of my nadir-reaching ways. However, a quick check informs me that a nadir is in fact, “the lowest point in the fortunes of a person or organization”, as well as “the point on the celestial sphere directly below an observer.” As I have not observed the celestial sphere in some time, I can deduce that the first definition is relevant. Hey, that was a BAD comment! What a jerk I was to write it.

Firefox 2 Spell Check Libraries
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/dictionaries

Before Firefox 2 I used the Spellbound extension. Now, with Firefox 2’s built-in spell-check functionality, I need only install a language library to nitpick everything that I and everybody else write in web forms. You can do the same. When using Google Groups to debate the finer points of Catholicism in alt.religion.obsessed, you can confidently proclaim, “I’d consider your position if you didn’t misspell ‘Transubstantiation’, loser!” And you would be so right.

Aspell Check for Trillian
http://www.trillian.cc/downloads/detail.php?item=395

For those of us using Trillian, instant messaging need no longer be an informal, guilt-free textual slog-fest. With Aspell, there’s plenty of shame to go around. Now talking about Friday night plans with your friends can be as much fun as diagramming sentences in high school. If you’ve ever wanted red underlines to go with your “Hay lets ply CS 2nite k!?”, this is the plug-in for you. I guarantee your fellow clan members will appreciate your dedication to the written word, if not gaming.

So, there they are - three quick ways to keep a borderline obsessive-compulsive bead on your online writing. And in the end, isn’t how we communicate vastly more important than what? For instance, I just wrote an entire, grammatically-correct article without conveying anything substantial. AM I RITE OR WUT!? ^_^