Reply #3: I learned anything that I know on my own

[hyphenate]

no classes, no instruction manual.

I WAS an English major, though, and am a writer as well, so that influences my style.

One thing I use a fair amount of in my own writing are dashes--for me, they come in very handy. Since we can't actually do an en or em dash without going into the ASCII character chart, it ends up being two hyphenates. Some people don't understand that, though. In Word, you can "autocorrect" to get the dash as a substitute, which is how I do it if I'm working on it.

Believe it or not, one of my favorite books is Strunk and White's Elements of Style. It's a great book to learn from.