"In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has." -- Mark Twain. [EFF Quotes Collection 9.0, comp.org.eff.talk, 9/19/95.]

If you'd like to be a technology reporter, check out . [<72621.2222@compuserve.com>, net-hap, 12/18/95.]

UniScience News Net publishes science and research news from American universities and freelance writers. Headlines and summaries are free; the full articles are for sale. . [Don Radler , new-jour, 11/21/95.]

Technical writers should get Janet Van Wicklen's "The Tech Writing Game" (Facts on File Books, 1992, $22.95 hardcover). For a style guide, Strunk and White's 92-page treatise "can change your life." Also useful: "The Elements of Style" (Macmillan) and William Zinsser's "On Writing Well" (Harper and Row, 1988). For reference, get "The Chicago Manual of Style," 14th edition (UChicago Press, $40). (It's 200 pages longer than the previous edition.) [M. Barnard , misc.writing, 6/22/95.]

Be wary of magazines such as The Writer and Writer's Digest for wanna-be's rather than professional writers. You can judge the intended audience by the advertising. [Ibid.]

For online reference works, try : English and other language dictionaries, acronym guides, thesauri, quotations, encyclopedias, maps, fact books, phone books, biographies, and Internet resources. [WEBster, 10/31/95.]

Need the help of a professional writer? Check out . [Sandra Bernstein, freelance, 8/14/95.]

The Write Byte is a monthly computer newsletter for fiction and non-fiction writers. "Written by professionals who are writers first and computists second so there's no technobabble." Free sample issues. . [T. Bruce Tober , alt.journalism, 10/20/95.]

(Tober was exposed to my .signature on the freelance discussion list; I guess he liked "computists." It's been used by a defunct "Hardcore Computists" magazine -- for software pirates, I think -- and in a few other mentions that Lycos can find. Is it technobabble?)