While some of us may find grammar intimidating (or is that just me?), I believe the real intention of grammar is to help us organize our communication effectively in such a way that we can easily follow the thoughts of the writer. Personally, I find all these rules confounding, and need to avail myself of the correct instances to use punctuation properly. I'm worried about the appropriateness of this thread, as its topic post is primarily an endorsement of a few links with useful information on clearing up our writing habits. If this comes across as too "spammy," then I apologize. The Free Dictionary is my go-to dictionary of choice because it loads quickly in spite of its functionality. It provides many interesting articles each day, and allows users to double-click any word on the site to instantly look it up. I feel as if their thesaurus may be a bit lacking at times, but this site alone allows you to customize its front page, provides links on helpful grammatical rules, and even includes encyclopedic entries and non-English languages. Of utmost use to me is this long list of Common Errors in English Usage, which is quite an exhaustive list, and this basic Guide to Grammar and Writing, which utilizes handy drop-down menus and details the fundamental technicalities of writing, particularly punctuation. If any of us are still unsure, perhaps we can all hammer the issues out here in this thread! And of course the issue I myself perpetrate the most is my lack of proofreading. I'm so glad we can always go back and rewrite things!
Since english is not my mother language, I tend to use dictionaries a lot. This is what I suggest: http://www.wordreference.com/ It also has the very useful functionality of linking the forum from the dictionary, if there is a topic related to your search. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ Already mentioned by GB http://www.urbandictionary.com/ I use this for slang. http://www.collinsdictionary.com/english-thesaurus The thesaurus. http://it.bab.la/ Not bad, but sometimes unaccurate
Just wanted to add grammarly, it is a chrome plug in and although it doesn't currently work with the site it provide a free spell checker that is better than the sites. It asks to you pay for a better one, but it will catch the big shit.
I second grammarly. I just started using it and it is awesome. I recommend paying if you can but the free version is fairly good as well.
http://www.wordhippo.com/ Can be used to look up words definition. find similar words, translate into other languages and several other useful features.
I am starting my first for the site and have found slickwrite as a handy free source to fixing grammer. Many tools available and great statistics to show my strength and weakness. Being that it is free I'm sure there is a downside somewhere.
I find that using a thesaurus is helpful. Typically I know what I want to say, but the way I usually want to say it is boring or worse... I've used a certain word too often!
