James Knight. The Truth is Out There--Honestly.
I cherished this brief piece, if only for the actual websites it lists. I have long been a user of wordreference.com, for its Italian-English and English-Italian dictionaries. Until a few years ago, I would have never thought of using the latter, but I've reached a point that every time I write a paper at least one word comes to mind in the other language, and this site (good but not great) has helped considerably. I also think the online English dictionary at dictionary.reference.com is excellent, providing for each word entries from several different major dictionaries as well as quick links to its also excellent thesaurus page with synonyms and antonyms. I have also briefly dabbled with and with 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, very interesting. One of my favorites, however, remains www.etimo.it, the complete (documentary) edition of Ottorino Pianigiani's classic Italian etymological dictionary, still the standard of excellence in my home country, and (for English) www.etymonline.com (highly recommended!).
(As I write this entry, I become aware of another compuer-related "mutation" in the standard process of writing: the present-day habit, be it fruitful or not, of writing while online. I can't speak for others, but I have become accustomed to doing most of my writing (whether for school or otherwise) with the internet running, one click away, teasing me from a minimized window at the bottom left of my screen. I routinely consult it, for specific refrerence (dictionaries, unc libarary page, even the dreaded wikipedia), curiosity (google the name of one the authors I'm reading, for example) loose inspiration (read a 13th century sonnet while I'm writing about 1910s avant-gardes, just to get the music back in my fingers...), or mere escape (espn.com). The great and powerful Time Warner high-speed, however, has just betrayed me (I immediately ran to the phone, called, and was informed of an outage in my area), and to an extent, I feel left in the dark, mutilated, paralized....)
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