editing * indexing

Resources for Writers

Online Grammar, Style, Spelling, and Editing Guides

American Psychological Association (APA) style and grammar guidelines.

Purdue University, Dictionaries, Style Manuals, Grammar Handbooks, and Editing Resources.

Newsletters

Note: Newsletters are often a benefit of membership in an association, and we can't joint them all. Here are some that I find useful.

Read Albertan - produced by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta, whose website contains a lot of information on Alberta and Canadian publishing news and issues.

VeryGoodCopy, by Eddie Shleyner. We all need the skills to write persuasively, even those of us who are not copywriters. This newsletter and site contains a lot of useful information and tips.

Merriam-Webster Word of the Day. This is always a win for me. I learn a new word, I become reacquainted with a word I haven't used in a while, or else I know and can define the term accurately, in which case I feel smart.

Books

Note: I'm a firm supporter of public libraries. I think that sometimes in this digital age we tend to ignore them in our information searches.

Barrett, Andrea. Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction. W.,W Norton, 2025. Barrett shares her knowledge and experience of writing historical and science-based fiction.

Memorable quote: "Why wouldn't we suspect that, if every generation needs to rewrite history, we also need to reimagine our historical fiction? Forgotten voices, documents lost or destroyed or ignored, entire fields of experience scanted, peoples and cultures misrepresented or not represented at all -- so much to write about, so much to explore! And so many ways to do it." (p. 8)

Bloomsbury (Publisher). Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2025 (118th edition). This series is from the United Kingdom, which is the primary focus, but international publishers are also listed. The Writer's Market series is based in North America. It used to have an online subscription service as well. I have always been able to obtain these from my public library.

Koenig, John. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Simon & Shuster, 2021. Invented words describing motions and the human condition generally. Inspiration for verbal inventiveness and character description and development.

Memorable quote: “Vemödalen – the fear that originality is no longer possible.”

Pavel, Thomas G. Lives of the Novel. Princeton University Press, 2013. My goodness, what a lot of books I haven't read! Pavel traces the development of long-form fiction from ancient Greece to the present, with detailed analyses of many major works. For anyone interested in the structure of novels.