Writing Services

Tripping through the fields on the Web, these tricks treats services caught my writer's eyes:

Kelley Sonora over at MatchaCollege.com just alerted me to a great resource on this page of free courses for writers. What a useful listing of free classes you can take to improve your hobby or craft. I can't vouch for the quality of the instruction offered, of course. You'll have to check out each of them for yourself.

Although I don't approve of wikis as an information source for researching subjects for articles, Wikipedia's new Wiktionary can be useful for a quick look up, especially when you just want the gist of a word. The incredible part that makes it so much fun are the 105 languages (at last check) that you can use in the main search engine. To try it out, I slammed in "schlemiel", one of my fave Yiddish words, and this service brought right up an understandable explanation.

Last, but not least, a fee service, eSpindle builds custom-designed English vocabulary and spelling sessions from a database of 100,000 words. This would be great for English language learners (ESL) of any age, although it seems to be designed for children using advanced technology. Let's hear it for Ed Tech! The home page contains a long list of questions you can get answered just by clicking on them. A variety of subscription plans as well as a free trial are available.