Roy Peter Clark from the Poynter Institute has posted 50 tips and mental tools that can help you become a better writer.
"...You will become handy with these tools over time. You will begin to recognize their use in the stories you read. You will see chances to apply them when you revise your own work. Eventually, they will become part of your flow, natural and automatic..."
Here are some quick tips for adding simple Textile formatting to your comments, though you can also use proper HTML tags:
*This* puts text in bold.
_This_ puts text in italics.
bq. This "bq." at the beginning of a paragraph, flush with the left hand side and with a space after it, is the code to indent one paragraph of text as a block quote.
To add a live URL, "Text to display":http://windsofchange.net/ (no spaces between) will show up as Text to display. Always use this for links - otherwise you will screw up the columns on our main blog page.
Thanks for the pointer, Joe! Very helpful, if only I could remember to consistently follow them.
But do they help you become a better speler?
He left out the most important tip: Have something to say. Of what value are tools if what you fabricate is of no interest?