PagePlane.com

May 14, 2010

Copywriting

A grammaphobe's nightmare

In high school, my objective in English class was to get the biggest laugh, not to actually learn anything. Onlinestylebooks.com, as I image it, was created by the girl in class who listened attentively and chuckled when someone said "chomping at the bit" instead of "champing at the bit".

For the record, a style manual is a set of style, usage, procedural, and technological standards adopted by a particular organization for the writing, design, and production of documents. Mary Beth Protomastro, the founder of Copyediting newsletter, owns and operates OnlineStylebooks.com—a search engine for 50-plus online stylebooks.

(To the best of my knowledge, she did not attend my high school.)