Like many on the Internet I struggle to write grammatically correct sentences. I have no real excuse for this, aside from my teachers doing more refereeing than teaching, but I am at least trying to learn how to improve my grammar through writing a Blog. In many ways writing is the best way of learning anything. If you can write about a certain subject without any real difficulty then it’s safe to say that you have knowledge on the subject; whether that knowledge is right or not is a completely different story.

The Internet is full of immensely talented designers and developers, where some portfolios speak for themselves. For those of us who aren’t blessed with the kind of talent that some show we have to do the speaking for our work, and by speaking I mean writing.

The problem is that most people on the Internet cannot write.

Photo by desi.italy. (Licence: Creative Commons Attribution)

After frequenting a number of web development forums dotted across the Internet I feel uneasy about the way designers and developers can be perceived. A lot of users really cannot spell or write coherantly on a forum, so imagine how they must represent themselves to clients! I’ve always maintained that a hardcore English writing course should be included with the majority of degree subjects, especially Computer Science. For those who don’t personally know me I am seriously considering applying for a Ph.D in Computer Science for when I finish my degree (hopefully with a first) and my (at times) awful grammar and lack of mathematical grounding is a grave concern. That being said, I’ve always found that the best way to achieve something is to work at it until you know it, and I’d like to share some of the stuff I’ve been reading.

I know it’s been mentioned in a few posts already, but for learning how to write correct English you can do no better than The King’s English by H. W. Fowler. Even though the book is in HTML format, making it unreadable to many, the content within is fantastic for anyone looking to overcome any inability to write syntactically-correct and understandable sentences.

Also, as many web designers and developers use Firefox as their browser of choice it is wise to take advantage of the fantastic spell-checking facilities built-into the browser. Back in 1995 it might have been cool to abbreviate everything to make it ‘easier to understand’, but we live in 2008 (at time of writing) and in this day and age we write properly!