References are Good

No, I'm not talking about a friend you can hit up for a good word to someone. I'm talking about reference manuals. A dictionary and thesaurus are the bare minimum for anyone that writes more than just letters and memos. Even better though are complete reference guides, like those that are required for college comp classes.

I have two of them currently, Pearson's Little Brown Handbook and Prentice Hall's Reference Guide, and I keep them both on my desk at all times. These handy little books are veritable fonts of grammatical knowledge as well as serving to offer various techniques for every step of the writing process. Even those who have a perfect grasp on the English language (Does anyone? I've never met anyone that knew every little idiosyncrasy of our language) can benefit from these books.

They're not just good as references either. If you ever find yourself stuck, staring at a line on the screen and don't know where to go, try flipping through one of these books. Many times the next line is already in your head, but you just don't know it yet. I can't count the number of times that looking how a sentence is formed or just reading different techniques of framing an idea has shown me what I already knew and just needed a little nudge to get free.