Before Jason Wilson left, he was preparing to answer a bunch of grammar questions. I didn't want to hurry him up because he seems like an incredibly busy man. But if we can get those questions answered, that'd be nice.

My question was about parentheses -- I see a lot of dashes used for parentheses, and I was wondering when you prefer them to commas or brackets. Thanks.

I have a couple of questions about Adsense. Do I need a credit card/pay pal account because i have niether and how do we create an ad? Is it just choosing a particular kind of ad?

Mentioning Ad-Sense early on would be a great idea. I would have it set up already If I knew.

I remember someone posted an extensive article on how to properly post on the site. I think that should be stickied in the about us section if not already.

A reminder for those who get There, Their, and They're mixed up. Happens to everyone at some point.

Correct use of punctuation. Colons, Semi colons, hyphens, etc...

That's all I have so far. I'll add more soon.

Please cover correct use of punctuation and how to polish writing in general.

I really **don't** want to see writing "tips" about spelling and grammar here on Bitmob. This isn't high school English class.

Bitmob is an experiment that is going to live or die by the quality of its community writing. I don't think we should be encouraging people who may someday have the potential to be writers, but who right now don't have even the most basic of toolsets.

There has to be a minimum bar set, and spelling, grammar, and punctuation is where I think we should draw the line.

I think more than spelling or grammar - which is something that can't really be taught by a single post - what would really benefit the community would be general article etiquette.

Things like the importance of images - as well as how to get them, which ones are best, where they should go, how big they should be, when captions should be used, using italics fpr captions and the correct way to space them in an article - and a general idea of when you should break your article up into pages would help the greener of us to consistently contribute to Bitmob's overall style.

There are lots of places to learn spelling, grammar and usage - and no offense, but other places can probably do it much better than the Bitmob staff - but you guys are the only ones who know all the standards that make up the style of your site and communicating those to the community is going to help us a ton.

Hey Dennis, have you seen the state of Internet writing? I don't think high schools are doing their jobs these days. ;)

We'll offer a few tips here and there, but it's not so much about correcting spelling or anything like that. A lot of this is to help us standardize different styles and interpretation of rules, esp. since we have Brits and Canadians here. Time for them to learn some American-glish, dammit!

(BTW, Brett Bates is working on a style guide to help with this consistency thing, too.)

Please, please dedicate a post on how to correctly title an article. Even the Bitmob staff is inconsistent in how to properly capitalize a title.

I've always been taught the first, last and important words such as nouns and verbs should be capitalized while articles like "the" and prepositions like "on" or "of" should remain lowercase.

Whichever way you decide, it'd be nice to know the way Bitmob wants it done.

Oh Chase, we have a format. You'll get taught! For reference, our new format is similar to say... the Economist's. We'll go into a little detail later.

And Dennis, what Dan said is right, we won't be teaching spelling and basic grammar, so I don't think we'll disappoint you there...but we'll provide some tips on how to best get our writers there.

But we will always encourage everyone to write anything. We don't draw lines...well, other than the one between the front-page and the Mobfeed. The MF is inclusive, while the front-page recognizes the best.

Yeah, I'd like a style guide. I already know how to write, but I always have to guess what the preferred style (and, sometimes, formatting) is here.

@Shoe We have Australians here, too. You should see how fucked up and confused Australian English is, with bits and pieces ripped from both American and British English, then mixed in with local slang and garnished with "international" English.

It'd be good to see some more advanced grammar tips. I see some mistakes cropping up a lot in articles on the Mobfeed.

@Andrew Really? When did that happen? My article from December that was promoted to the front page is capitalized in the fashion I described above.

I would also like to see a little headline guide. 

I noticed about a month ago that Bitmob switched to capitalizing only the first word and proper nouns in a title. Can't say I'm a fan from an aesthetic viewpoint, but it's good to do for consistency's sake.

And a big ole "yes!" to a tutorial on picture selection and placement. That's one area that I've never felt confident in.    

- A general Bitmob style guide would be the most helpful.
- Image placement would be another one I'd like. I generally find I'm okay with this kinda thing, but sometimes I'm not hugely confident about it.
- I think an article about general writing tips and good habits would be helpful. I preach to everyone that they should do multiple drafts and keep copies of them all so they can go back in case they catastrophically destroy a piece in the future, for example. I'm kind of a hypocrite in that sense, as I rarely do a second draft of anything before I publish on here, and it shows once an editor has given it the once over!
- Software. I get the impression that some people write their posts in the browser as opposed to a dedicated word processing app. Maybe listing some of the useful word processors and other useful tools would be handy. I use quite a few apps (including three different word processors, depending on the story) across my devices to aid my writing, and I'm sure the community have their own favourites too.

Also, I agree with Dennis that we really shouldn't be teaching people the correct use of 'their', 'they're' and 'there', or 'your' and 'you're'. People are either are too young to have been taught it in school yet, too ignorant to realise they've done it wrong, or have genuinely made a mistake (it happens) and are aware of the difference. If they're one of the first two, then they really shouldn't be writing on here until their use of English is a little better.

LIke many people have said, I think a general style guide for posting on Bitmob would be great.  I'm sure it'd be helpful to a great many of people.

I'm more skeptical about the grammar rule ideas, though, since this isn't really a place for those without at least a little know-how for writing, as least in my opinion.

And finally, I know this isn't writing related, but something about Adsense would be helpful!  I didn't know about it until I read this.  xD

Wait. Is it noun then verb or verb then noun? What about adjectives? I must know!

Grammar would be a big thing that could be covered. Things like paragraph flow would be excellent to learn about in my opinion. Nothing's worse than reading something that feels jumpy. Comma placement, where to use colons/semi-colons. Anything that would make articles look professional.

Also, as many have said, teach us how to use Adsense please.