OT: Getting it write when righting
OK, so maybe it's not completely off-topic, since written communication is probably very important to bloggers in general, even .NET bloggers, but while I was putting together my previous blog entry, I did a Google search to ensure that I was using the phrase "hear, hear" correctly (it's not "here, here", as some write it). I ran across the following link, which lists this as well as a number of other common "homophone" errors, and also lists a variety of other common grammatical errors. If you write (and few of us don't), you should take a look. It also covers my personal pet peeve, "loose" vs. "lose":
"lose his virginity" (not "loose");
[grammatical witnesses]
One of the most useful passages:
19. Your unconventional grammar choices aren't creative license; they're bad grammar. There's quite a bit of leeway with this, of course: sentence fragments and comma splices can, in the right hands, be good writing. But one of the primary purposes of writing-- if not the primary purpose-- is communication, and if your mechanics are so bad or your word choices so strange that others can't understand them, you're not communicating. Also, any divergence from standard English usage should be a purposeful choice. If you use "gonna" because that's the word that you think your narrator would use, or you eschew quotation marks because you want to blur the distinction between thought and speech, then you've made a purposeful choice. It may or may not be a good choice, but at least you've thought about how your unconventional usage will affect the impact your story has on its readers. But using bad grammar because you can't be arsed, or because you think standard English looks funny on the page? Not cool, and not defensible.
All in all a very useful (and concise) compendium of common writing problems, and one well worth bookmarking for anyone who wants their writing taken seriously. As developers, we've got the luxury of compilers that will tell us when we get something wrong. As bloggers and writers, we don't have that luxury. It's not enough just to run a spell check before posting something...you really should have a good handle on the language and it's usage (this applies to all languages, not just English), or at the very least, bookmark a cheat-sheet like this.