Life hackers love to empty their pockets, bags, and packs and show off their gear. Freelance writers have their own version of every day carry: the essential reference works that, collectively, are the writerly equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife or a Leatherman tool.
Even in this era of instant electronic reference, I still rely on these books — not just because I know them so well, but also because they remain consistently and authoritatively accurate.
And quite a few of them are fun to read, too.
Here’s a list of my “every day reference.” Some of these may surprise you.
“. . . and then we’ll give you the draft to wordsmith.”
In the course of designing and testing 
We’ve heard it so often, it seems like a truism: in this era of instant electronic information access, libraries are like dinosaurs that don’t know they’re already extinct.
New Year’s Day is the traditional time for resolutions to take effect. Have you made writing and editorial resolutions for your business yet?
Whether you write to sell, invite, entice, or provoke, your words can’t do their job unless the audience sees them. In professional writing, distribution is everything. The availability of new electronic distribution technologies only increases the opportunities — and the challenges — for reaching them.
Considering the name of my writing and editorial business, you might imagine that I would be skeptical of an article extolling the virtues of passive voice. But what if such an article is written by Web usability expert 
Journalist Xeni Jardin recently discussed the perils of storing and deleting government e-mail on her weekly NPR spot, 
“Nagle was forty years old then, a thin, deeply tanned former Snap-On Tool Salesman of the Year. To see him there, waiting for the fisherman in his tattered T-shirt and thrift-shop sandals, the Jim Beam he kept as his best friend slurring his motions, no one would guess that he had been an artist, that in his day Bill Nagle had been great.” — Robert Kurson, Shadow Divers (Random House, 2004), p5