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What is the best way to improve your Grammar and improve your writing style?
What would be the best online resource to improve my grammar?

I maintain a blog of my own, and I have reasonably good spoken English, but it seems that I make a lot of grammatical mistakes, which are annoying to the readers; it also seems that I write unusually long sentences, and I can do a better job at breaking them.

Does reading older literature help in improving style?

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  • Not worth posting an answer for, but as you become more fluent in English, proper grammar becomes more obvious. Run on sentences, sentence fragments, and other grammar issues are still a problem for fluent speakers and are generally overlooked in informal communications. The ones that annoy people are usually due to a lack of fluency causing you to say things in a way a fluent speaker would not, despite the meaning still being clear.
    – Brett Allen
    Sep 9, 2011 at 7:31
  • Yeah in spoken English you can ignore these trivia as long as you can speak well. In written communication specially a blog these become more important. What are the popular places you read to improve grammar ?
    – Geek
    Sep 9, 2011 at 8:02

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I would say reading is the best way to improve your writing. Language has a lot to do with mimicry. It's about repeated exposure to all the phrases and vocabulary people use. We naturally pick up on the expressions of others and accommodate (sociolinguistics term) to match their style. So if you want to write better blogs, read the blogs of authors whose style you admire. Read newspapers and magazines. Read books on the subjects you write about. Reading old books will only help if that is the style you are going for. Language changes over time, there is no absolute right or wrong way to write, at least not for English.

If you do want to be anal about your grammar and punctuation you could always read up on something like Strunk and White's Elements of Style: http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Style-Fourth-William-Strunk/dp/020530902X. It's quite old and pretty crazy from what I hear, but some people swear by it. There are other prescriptive grammar resources out there I'm sure.

If there are certain silly mistakes you keep accidentally making maybe there are some language games out there that could cure you of your bad habits.

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