’s competition for the Best Grammar Blog of 2011 has finally, absolutely and completely closed, and Shady Characters has parlayed 8th place into an actual title: “The Best Grammar Blog of 2011 for Punctuation Tips”. Thanks are in order one last time to all those who voted for Shady Characters!
After a relaxing little interlude, it’s time for me to start on the Shady Characters book in earnest. While I do so, though, some readers have shared links that might be of interest.
On Twitter, Jason Black pointed out Benjamin Milde’s novel site Shapecatcher.com. Draw a letter, mark of punctuation or other symbol with your mouse and Shapecatcher will attempt to identify it from a set of about 10,000 Unicode characters. It’s Shazam for letterforms, and it made a decent fist of my hastily-drawn interrobang.