20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Makes I’ve edited a monthly magazine for more than six years, and it’s a job that’s come with more frustration than reward. If there’s one thing I am grateful for — and it sure isn’t the pay — it’s that my work has allowed endless time to hone my craft to Louis Skolnick levels of grammar geekery. As someone who slings red ink for a living, let me tell you: grammar is an ultra-micro component in the larger picture; it lies somewhere in the final steps of the editing trail; and as such it’s an overrated quasi-irrelevancy in the creative process, perpetuated into importance primarily by bitter nerds who accumulate tweed jackets and crippling inferiority complexes. Below are 20 common grammar mistakes I see routinely, not only in editorial queries and submissions, but in print: in HR manuals, blogs, magazines, newspapers, trade journals, and even best selling novels. Who and Whom This one opens a big can of worms. Which and That Lay and Lie This is the crown jewel of all grammatical errors. Moot Nor
Online Project Management & Planning Software Refreshed review of Outlinely — a new outliner for Mac [Due to the major hash I made of my previous review of Outlinely, I have decided to start over with a (mostly) new review.] Thanks to the eagle-eye of one of the folks over at outlinersoftware.com, I was recently made aware of a new outlining application for Mac known as Outlinely (requires OS 10.8 or higher). Aside from the name, there is a lot to like about this nifty little app. The introductory price of $5 makes it a real bargain. Outlinely is a new option for people who use outlines for writing, planning, thinking, tracking, note-taking and more. The application has a clean interface that does feel a lot like a word processor, which is one of the goals stated by the developer. OPMLPDFHTMLRTFDOCMarkdown (it adds the markdown code for you — see the screenshot at the end of this article for an example)Plain text With Outlinely you can focus in on one topic. You can toggle topics between “done” and not done using the keystrokes command-D. Like this: Like Loading...
Perform Lengthy Tasks With One Click Using Click.to For Mac Earlier this year, we featured Click.to app for Windows which significantly saves you tedious mouse clicking to perform lengthy tasks, such as, sharing images and files on social media platforms, searching YouTube videos, sending selected text to default email client’s compose window and more. For those who aren’t familiar with Click.to, it’s a user-centric application that provides a list of actions for text, images, documents and items in clipboard to instantly perform them over the focused item. Click.to has recently released the Mac version which supports both Mac Snow Leopard and Lion. Like its Windows counterpart, Click.to for Mac can be used to quickly share Mac OS X clipboard items on Facebook and Twitter, initiate Google and YouTube search for selected text, send text to Mac Mail app compose window and so on. The configuration process is easy. Based on your Click.to satellite menu, it shows only the compatible actions when files are copied to clipboard. Download Click.to
CriticMarkup Want A Complete Year-End Report On Your Email (For Free)? ToutApp Has You Covered. I’ve been meaning to write about this for awhile now, but I’ve been a bit under the weather and, well, email is not a subject I always enjoy — in discussion or in practice. Yes, as many have written before, we have a love-hate relationship with email, which has been shown in even starker relief with the redesign of Gmail. We first wrote about ToutApp back in June of last year and again in November, because they are a young startup (backed by some smart people) trying to give us a shot at greater email productivity. Put simply, ToutApp integrates with Gmail and scans your inbox to parse through emails to identify the most commonly-sent mass emails, then creates a dynamic template for that email chain, allowing users to autofill recipients, auto-CC, attach files, etc. It may sound invasive to some, but it’s a great tool, and you have to respect Tout Founder TK Kader’s perspective on email and entrepreneurship. I saw nearly 70,000 emails in 2011, and that doesn’t include my personal email.
Online Editor – Grammar Checker Technical Limit: 280 characters (4,000 for X Premium users) Recommended: 71-100 characters Why? Shorter posts have higher engagement and are easier to read quickly on a fast-scrolling platform. Technical Limit: 63,206 characters Recommended: 40-80 characters Why? Technical Limit: 2,200 characters (including hashtags) Recommended: 138-150 characters Why? Technical Limit: 5,000 characters Markdown Download Markdown 1.0.1 (18 KB) — 17 Dec 2004 Introduction Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). Thus, “Markdown” is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML. The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The best way to get a feel for Markdown’s formatting syntax is simply to look at a Markdown-formatted document. (You can use this ‘.text’ suffix trick to view the Markdown source for the content of each of the pages in this section, e.g. the Syntax and License pages.) Markdown is free software, available under a BSD-style open source license. Discussion List I’ve set up a public mailing list for discussion about Markdown. Installation and Requirements Movable Type Blosxom BBEdit