www.freerice.com

This is my favorite website of this Webwatch article. Improve your vocabulary and change the world! With each word you get right in this online quiz, Free Rice donates twenty grains of rice to feed the poor. The site’s advertisers pay for the rice. I originally heard about this website on National Public Radio where they commended its unique combination of education and altruism. Some teachers even use it in their classrooms. All you do is answer increasingly harder vocabulary questions. Each correct answer you give increases your donated rice total.

grammar.quickanddirtytips.com

The most popular grammar website right now is Grammar Girl, a fun and helpful podcast produced by Mignon Fogarty. According to her website, Mignon’s “archenemy is the evil Grammar Maven who inspires terror in the untrained and is neither friendly nor helpful.” Mignon addresses issues of punctuation, word choice (effect/affect, lay/lie), and general grammar and style issues.

www.visualthesaurus.com

This is such a fun website that you don’t even notice you’re learning. The visual thesaurus is a paid subscription-based tool for people who think visually. When you type in a word, an interactive map or visual network of words comes up. You can click on any of the mapped terms and explore. I am a visual learner and I found this beautiful and useful. Finally a thesaurus that thinks like I do.

www.onelook.com

This is both a regular dictionary and a reverse dictionary, which means you can search for meaning and get words or terms. For example, I can type in the definition, “being tried twice for the same crime” and get “double jeopardy” as a result. It’s a fun tool to try and can be very helpful when you have that word right on the tip of your tongue but can’t quite remember it.

minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/podcasts/grammar_grater

Grammar Grater is a weekly podcast from Minnesota Public Radio. A good feature of this podcast is its coverage of grammar in the “information age.” With email and blogging and instant messaging we all need a little help. This is also a great site if you want to listen and learn while you drive or work out.

www.bartleby.com

If it’s words you want, Bartleby has them. Bartleby claims it is the preeminent Internet publisher of literature, reference, and verse. It provides a number of free resources online. Some of what you will find here include a dictionary of quotations, daily definitions, biographies, encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauruses, the world factbook, fiction, nonfiction, and verse. Every time I want to use an online encyclopedia it seems that I have to pay or register. Bartleby offers them for free. Particularly worthy of note is the Columbia Encyclopedia, which contains nearly 51,000 entries and more than 80,000 hypertext cross-references.

wordsmith.org/words/today.html

Wordsmith is a fun word website. The home of “a word a day,” it’s a community of more than 600,000 linguaphiles in at least 200 countries. If you want to keep up with newly coined words, you’ll find them here. If you want to expand your vocabulary but don’t have the time to check a website or dictionary every day, you can add Wordsmith’s a-word-a-day RSS feed to your email and receive five words and their definitions each week. Wordsmith has been posting words of the day since 1994 and you access all of them in the archive. There is also a theme list. For January 2007 the themes included odd-looking words, words that have many unrelated meanings, and eponyms. Do you know what an eponym is?

www.copyblogger.com

If you are a blogger or write content for a website, check out this site. There are some great tips here not only about writing but also about catching people’s attention. I particularly recommend “Five grammatical errors that make you look dumb” and “How to write a headline.”

www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/ features/howtowrite/index.shtml

Do you want to write professionally or have a story in you to tell? You need more than just

good grammar. This website is about how to write for a variety of different venues, including how to write a radio play, a memoir, a novel, a screenplay, and more. It also includes advice from sucessful writers. Each area has subtopics. For example,

the section on how to write a radio play covers first thoughts, structure, characters, developing dialogue, and thinking in sound. This is a good site for kids who want to write a book or make movies someday.

Dictionary tool

My favorite dictionary tool is to add “dictionary” to my iGoogle page (or you can also do this with Yahoo! pages) since I have everything else pulled into Google. Then it’s right where I need it. o

heidi Griepp is manager of covenant internet Services and an avid Web wanderer. Know of a great site you think should be here?