Asterisks.com offers some free language advice and links to online reference sources. For fun, we share some amusing blunders collected by editors.

WRITING FOR A GLOBAL READERSHIP

As first-language English users we often need to communicate effectively with people for whom English is a foreign or a second language, for instance when conducting business internationally. The Internet, particularly, is a global medium of communication, and we cannot assume that our audience reads or understands English flawlessly.
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BUSINESS DOCUMENTS WITH PUNCH

Time spent on planning your communications will pay dividends. Make a rough draft of what you want to write or say, so that you can experiment with various versions. Remember that language is important because the words you choose convey your attitudes as well as information.
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GENDER-NEUTRAL LANGUAGE

Most of us do not consider ourselves to be sexist. However, sexist language is hard to avoid – historically, English is riddled with it. While not always obvious or easy to pick up, such terms can immediately alienate or irritate a gender-conscious reader.
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COMMA ERRORS

Can you see anything wrong with these examples?

They are both examples of an extremely common error: using commas to join whole sentences.
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	Acute or chronic?
	Adverse or averse?
	Affect or effect?
	Amoral or immoral?
	Biannual or biennial?
	More answers to tricky language questions...

Online reference sources

A wealth of dictionaries and other reference works can be accessed online.

	OneLook Dictionaries – look up words in 137 dictionaries at the same time.
	The Dictionary of American Regional English seeks to document the varieties of English that are not found everywhere in the United States.
	At the Foreign Languages for Travelers site you can select from a large number of languages and look up basic words and phrases in their translating dictionaries. You can also listen to recordings of the entries.
	Netlingo – A dictionary of Internet language. Find the definitions of the ever-increasing volume of Internet jargon.
	The List of Dictionaries of the Universität-GH Paderborn provides links to a variety of multi-lingual dictionaries.
	More links to online language resources...

All in a day's work We've come across some amusing mistakes while editing. See the disastrous results of getting your words wrong...