Now, with the Internet, these and many other research tools are just a click away.
Dictionaries and References
You have to make sure you're using the right word at the right time. Or, if making a malaprop, misusing the right word at the right time. And with some people (I'm sure you're not one of them), spelling the word correctly.
Dictionary.com, is an online resource to look up definitions. Also online are Roget's Thesaurus, Common Errors in English, Strunk's Elements of Style, and Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.
Another similiar site is The Reference Desk, which also contains links to other research tools, including encyclopedias (some require paid subscriptions). You can also click directly to Encyclopedia.com, which does not charge for its service.
Search Engines
These are terrific, and cut down research time considerably. But there are so many that it may take time to find the one you work with most easily.
Three of my favorites are AltaVista, Yahoo!, and Cyber 411.
Probably the best trick I've learned is: When looking for a specific name or title, enclose the request in quotation marks. This narrows the search down dramatically.
For example, I performed a Yahoo! search for Neil Simon that returned 44,614 locations, including some that were for Neil Diamond and some for Paul Simon. However, when I put "Neil Simon" in the search box, it returned only 2,919 web locations.
Continued practice helps you to determine even better ways to focus information searches.
Public Domain Manuscripts
These are invaluable for getting actual quotations, reference citations, or for adapting a classic work. For quotations and citations, you can pull up the entire work, perform a search (such as Ctrl+F {'Find'} in Netscape), to locate a specific passage from a multitude of manuscripts. For adaptations, I save the manuscript on my hard drive, then use that as my baseline when I started adapting the work for a stage play.
One of the best sites for public domain works is Project Gutenberg, whose philosophy is to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search. Another access point into Project Gutenberg is through Sailor, Maryland's Online Information Service.
I use the above tools extensively and with success and productivity. The following items are less tested, but are nonetheless opportunities, ultimately being what you make of them. My successes or failures with agents, publishers, and producers are no guarantees of anyone else having similar successes or failures. I offer the following as examples of the plethora of similar opportunities for writers. Search engines will help you locate scads more.
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