Grammar questions answered; Washington, DC, writing events publicized; and job openings posted: the DCPubs Yahoo! Group

The DCPubs Yahoo! Group is a great resource for communications professionals in the Washington, DC, area.

DCPUBS is a list for editors, designers, production folks and other people in the Washington DC area working on publications who want to discuss anything related to editing: sticky style issues; newspaper, technical, and other specialized editing; reference books; production and desktop publishing; marketing and distribution issues; client relations; Internet resources; electronic editing and software; freelance issues; and so on.

Sure that description includes so many areas that DCPubs could be construed as so inclusive as to be useless. That’s not so. I find the group most useful in these three areas:

• Job postings—A lot of freelance and contract jobs are posted here. Also when people ask me for help finding a full-time communications person, I refer them to DCPubs.
• Questions—While the style manuals I reviewed on a previous post are great resources, there are times when none of them will contain the information you need (especially if you are writing about emerging technology). But a quick post on DCPubs will get your question answered within minutes.
• Events—The DC area has a plethora of book stores, writing centers, and other cultural venues, so it’s hard to keep track of all of the writing-related events. Also, several of the regular posters on DCPubs often give lectures and publicize them here.

You need to apply to join, but it takes less than a minute, costs nothing, and has only about a one-day lag time for new members to be accepted.

Also, as the forum is a busy one, if you do join, I recommend subscribing to the daily digest rather then receiving each post individually (unless you are lonely and want more e-mail).

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