Barbara Wallraff reigns at Word Court. I’ve always admired Barbara’s approach to grammar and usage, which is impeccably informed, never opaque, and quietly witty. Barbara is also the author of Word Court: Wherein Verbal Virtue Is Rewarded, Crimes Against the Language Are Punished, and Poetic Justice Is Done, Word Fugitives: In Pursuit of Wanted Words, and Your Own Words.

Grammar Girl, aka Mignon Fogarty, promises “quick and dirty tips for better writing.” Her site is part of a gimmicky branding scheme—other “Quick and Dirty” sites give you advice on parenting (“Kids and Naps”), pets (“What to Do About Your Humping Dog”) and protecting your capital (“How to Short Sell a Stock”). But the Grammar Girl podcasts are serious stuff. Each podcast deals with one grammar dilemma, often spawned by an emailed. The typical podcast lasts only a few minutes, and is friendly but credible. (It usually includes multiple citations.) The transcripts are posted on the Web site, so you can read along as Fogarty breezes past “between” and settles on “how to use semicolons.”

Long before there was Grammar Girl there was The Slot, which began in August 1995 as the Crusty Old Slot Man’s Copy-Editing Peeve Page. Its creator is Bill Walsh, a copy editor at The Washington Post. Walsh’s day job shapes the issues he covers on his two sites—The Slot and Blogslot—and his two books, Lapsing into a Comma and The Elephants of Style.

Common Errors in English by Paul Brians isn’t much to look at, but the no-frills, alphabetical listings allows you to go straight to whatever word is vexing you. An emeritus English professor at Washington State University, Brians gives simple pronouncements on everything from “a/an” to “zoology” and he denounces the falsehoods that Miss Thistlebottoms and Old Curmudgeons brainlessly insist upon.

The lively blog at Language Hat is maintained by a former student of historical linguistics who was born in Tokyo, grew up in various hemispheres, and ended up an editor in Manhattan. (He prefers to remain anonymous and gives tidbits of his bio under the clever “my hats” link, which is literally about his collection of hats.) This is really a site about language more than grammar or writing, and includes links to the Boston Globe column called “The Word,” the sci.lang FAQ, the Dictionary of the Scots Language, and The Kanji Site.

The tagline of Motivated Grammar—Prescriptivism Must Die!—gives you an idea of its slant. The creation of Gabe Doyle, a graduate student in Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego, it’s a bit geeky—more linguistics jousting than guide to good writing. Doyle describes himself as a computational psycholinguist, which means that he uses computers to model how people think about language. He says his purpose is to “set the record straight”—to explain the motivations behind the real grammar of English and to debunk ill-founded claims about what is grammatical and what isn’t.

There are a gazillion dictionaries out there, and some are much more respected than other. Many people think “Webster’s” is the key word, but it’s actually meaningless; what matters is the publisher and its reputation for lexicography. Here’s a roundup on the dictionaries editors tend to favor, with a bit of explanation as to why.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (just released in its 11^th edition). This is the dictionary most often used by copy editors at magazines and books, for its careful lexicography and usage notes.

Webster’s New World Dictionary, Third Edition. This dictionary preferred by many newspapers, because it tends to add terms more rapidly, so it gives newspapers a way of being consistent in their pages.

American Heritage Dictionary. This is a favorite of many wordsmiths, for its extensive usage notes.

Random House Unabridged Dictionary. If you’ve got a huge budget and a big bookshelf, this is a wonderful dictionary to have in addition to either MW 11 or Webster’s New World.

Oxford English Dictionary. If you’ve got an even huger budget and a bigger bookshelf, go for this 20+ volume dictionary, which includes citations all the way back to Beowulf. This is one for real dictionary snobs: The citations go back as far as the dictionary researchers can trace a word, so you can see how Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Mark Twain used it. It has even been the subject of a bestseller, The Madman and the Dictionary, by Simon Winchester. (Oxford also publishes smaller dictionaries, which are reputable, but not usually preferred by American publishers.)

Be aware of the difference between “Roget’s style” and “dictionary style” thesauruses. The latter is arranged alphabetically; the former uses an index in the back and numbered entries in the front. The dictionary style is easier to use, but less fruitful. The Roget’s involves multiple steps (looking up a word in the back index, and then turning to various ones of the numbered citations), but yields many more possible synonyms and will inspire you to find the perfect word.

As with dictionaries, the key is to go with a reliable publisher, in addition to finding a Roget’s style thesaurus.

Many individual newspapers have their own style manuals, but here are the three most general and most generally used ones.

The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law. The standard in newsrooms all around the country. Journalists love it for its easy-to-use A to Z organization. Also included is a primer on libel and other legal issues.

The Chicago Manual of Style, Fifteenth Edition. This is the manual preferred by magazine and book publishers. The new addition has badly needed advice on handling how to deal with Web sites, URLs, and the like.

Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age. A complement to AP and Chicago, which for a long time did not address the kinds of questions made burning by the Internet. It includes an essay on writing in the age of email.

Usage guides don’t define words as a dictionary does, and they don’t tell you how to capitalize words or where to put hyphens as a style manual does. Instead they explain the way we use words in English, and the subtle differences between certain words (e.g., affect and effect) that are often confused.

Dictionary of Modern American Usage, by Bryan Garner. Garner represents the gold standard to many in the trade.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. This is a solid alternative by the makers of the dictionary of choice at many publications.

Look in this space for selections from my collection of all-time favorite pieces, spiced with some recent stories.

These will usually be works of literary nonfiction, but I couldn’t resist launching with this shortie from the May 4 New Yorker. Titled “Buzzed,” it’s a hilarious fantasy by Noah Baumbach about what happens when scientists, curious about the biochemistry of addiction, dropped liquefied freebase cocaine on bees’ backs.

The number of sites that post graceful writing grows every day. You can’t go wrong at The New Yorker’s online incarnation, and many other magazines offer interesting experiments in new media. I’m on the lookout for beautifully written blogs, in which masterful writers explore the form and manage to do much more than whine, pine, and opine. More on that soon, I hope.

In the meantime, if you want to read great examples of narrative journalism, the Narrative Digest offers a new batch of stories, as well as commentary and various resources, every two weeks. The site is published by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

The production of a group of ambitious and talented reporters in Florida, Gangrey has been called “a well-kept candy shop open to anyone who appreciates good writing.” It features mainly news stories from around the country, as well as spirited discussion of them, as well as of the changing platforms of journalism.

Speaking of changing platforms, make sure not to miss Interactive Narratives, produced by the Online News Association. The site’s tagline reads “the best in multimedia storytelling,” and the focus here is truly on the merging of text, audio, video, and graphics.

Barak Obama may be a damn good rhetoritician, but his politically correct use of pronouns is bugging me. Take this, from the July 22 press conference when he waded into the Henry Louis Gates-Sgt. Crowley brouhaha: “I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.”

While pundits jumped on the President’s case for saying the Cambridge police acted “stupidly,” I muttered under my breath about his use of “they” when “he” or “she” was called for.

It may be the height of pettiness to demand grammatical perfection of presidents speaking off the cuff. But this isn’t the only time Obama has committed this particular gaff. In a pre-election commercial he said, “Every parent in America wants the same thing: good education for their child.”

Doesn’t a good education include grammar?

Now, I had the same English teachers as our president—at Punahou School, in Honolulu—and to be honest I can’t remember what grammar lessons we got there. But I know that somebody is one of those troublesome indefinite pronouns (like anyone, anybody, everyone, everybody, someone, somebody, no one, and nobody) that is always singular.

I also know that I’m wading into one of the subjects that can make word nerds—not the type usually prone to unbridled passions—go apoplectic. Some recite history and a seemingly infinite string of writers (everyone from Spenser to Shakespeare, from Austen to Auden, from Mark Twain to Rudyard Kipling) who use “they” as a singular pronoun. (See this screed at crossmyt.com.)  Others (like Merriam-Webster’s) argue that if this is how people use the pronoun, we should all accept it. And others, like Grammar Girl, advise us to play it safe by recasting sentences.

I’m interested neither in political correctness nor grammatical hypercorrectness. I’m interested in clarity. Using “their” to refer to a single person blurs lines and introduces ambiguity.

So, Mr. President: We know that Gates is a guy. Don’t use grammar stupidly. Go ahead and say the police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that he was in his own home.

In case you haven’t noticed, each week I post some writing and grammar exercises—a  easy, self-guided writing class. Check out For Writers and Teachers, under Resources. I have a growing email list of teachers who receive once-a-week notes on using Sin and Syntax in the classroom. Please feel free to join us.

I try not to be a grammar pedagogue here, using this blog mostly for thoughts on writing. But I’m feeling a pent-up desire to go grammatical. Next post: One of my biggest pet peeves and how I wish our Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning president didn’t mash his pronouns.

I’m fascinated with writing that uses the techniques of fiction to enliven nonfiction, whether in print, online, over the radio or in documentary films.

Ken Burns is hard to ignore—not just because his The National Parks: America’s Best Idea preempted PBS prime-time programming last week—but also because he has the chops and the resources to do great narrative journalism. I mainly agreed with Mary McNamara’s LA Times review, but while watching endless footage of razorlike mountains and verdant plains, I couldn’t help muttering, “Does it have to be so long?” “Could the writing have more frisson?” “Can Burns do tone that isn’t elegiac?”

As editor of the Nieman Foundation’s Narrative Digest, I once wrote a column called “Narrative” Is Not a Synonym for “Long.” In it I offered examples of some who write tight but still trace a narrative arc:  Charlie LeDuff, in “Frozen in Indifference,” published in The Detroit News, keeps his focus pointed and poignant. Matthew Parker’s “A Student of Intimacy, Step by Step” is one of many examples in the Modern Love column of the Sunday The New York Times. Another Sunday Times short narrative I hate to miss is Verlyn Klinkenborg’s, “The Rural Life.”

Touché to Burns for stretching our attention spans, but the dude needs a tough editor. Some of the footage is so familiar as to be predictable (like Marian Anderson and Martin Luther King, Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial). Internal repetitions need paring, especially when interviewees echo each other. Then there are the musical schemes, fresh in The Civil War but hackneyed now.

In one voiceover, a park lover comments on the “artistic restraint” of wolves in the wilderness. We all need some of that artistic restraint.