During National Novel Writing Month, quantity is everything, and quality is merely optional. As a result, participants are defined by, goaded by and obsessed by their word counts. Anyone who reaches at least 50,000 words is deemed a winner. Shortly after the clock struck midnight on Thursday, the results for this year were in: nearly 13,000 of the writers reported making it to the finish.

Each year exhausted and triumphant writers insert their novels into the word-count verifier - the words are encrypted in case anyone might want to steal that brilliant mess - on the official Web site, nanowrimo.org. It is done on the honor system, which means that someone could theoretically submit "The Great Gatsby" (about the right length).

Winners receive an online certificate, and "win or lose, you rock for even trying," the site says. Even the nonfinishers are invited to the "Thank God It’s Over" parties, and they can have their words included in the collective final word count, which was 982,495,939 this year.

For many of the writers the month is as much a series of social events as a way to put together a novel. But that is not to minimize the true suffering that occurs. Every year more than 80 percent of those who sign up for the project do not finish, often because the experience is just too painful. First there is the toll on the rest of the novelist's life, with friends, family, co-workers and living spaces sure to be neglected.

Ah, rewriting. It hurts so bad, but it helps so much. If your book was born in November, it's going to take many, many months (if not years) of revision before it's ready for the bookstore shelves. That's the bad news. The good news is that novel rewriting is just as exciting and satisfying as novel writing (if not more so!).

The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it's threatening to finish off longhand. When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.

And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less. As a result, more and more students struggle to read and write cursive. Many educators shrug. Stacked up against teaching technology, foreign languages and the material on standardized tests, penmanship instruction seems a relic, teachers across the region say. But academics who specialize in writing acquisition argue that it's important cognitively, pointing to research that shows children without proficient handwriting skills produce simpler, shorter compositions, from the earliest grades.

Scholars who study original documents say the demise of handwriting will diminish the power and accuracy of future historical research. And others simply lament the loss of handwritten communication for its beauty, individualism and intimacy.

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There are those who say the culture is at a crossroads, turning permanently from the written word to the typed one. If handwriting becomes a lost form of communication, does it matter? It was at U-Va. that researchers recently discovered a previously unknown poem by Robert Frost, written in his signature script. Handwritten documents are more valuable to researchers, historians say, because their authenticity can be confirmed. Students also find them more intriguing.

"They feel closer to that person as an actual human, that somebody actually wrote that just like me," said Jim Mohr, a professor of U.S. history at the University of Oregon at Eugene, who wrote a book on diaries from the Civil War. "There's a kind of personal authenticity to individual writing that's hard to capture any other way."

Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that "anyone can edit." Unless you want to edit the entries on Albert Einstein, human rights in China or Christina Aguilera. Wikipedia's come-one, come-all invitation to write and edit articles, and the surprisingly successful results, have captured the public imagination. But it is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be, because maintaining so much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs.

At its core, Wikipedia is not just a reference work but also an online community that has built itself a bureaucracy of sorts — one that, in response to well-publicized problems with some entries, has recently grown more elaborate. It has a clear power structure that gives volunteer administrators the authority to exercise editorial control, delete unsuitable articles and protect those that are vulnerable to vandalism.

Those measures can put some entries outside of the "anyone can edit" realm. The list changes rapidly, but as of yesterday, the entries for Einstein and Ms. Aguilera were among 82 that administrators had "protected" from all editing, mostly because of repeated vandalism or disputes over what should be said. Another 179 entries — including those for George W. Bush, Islam and Adolf Hitler — were "semi-protected," open to editing only by people who had been registered at the site for at least four days. (See a List of Protected Entries)

While these measures may appear to undermine the site's democratic principles, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, notes that protection is usually temporary and affects a tiny fraction of the 1.2 million entries on the English-language site. "Protection is a tool for quality control, but it hardly defines Wikipedia," Mr. Wales said. "What does define Wikipedia is the volunteer community and the open participation."

A panel of linguists has decided the word that best reflects 2005 is "truthiness," defined as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts.

The American Dialect Society chose the word Friday after a runoff with terms related to Hurricane Katrina, such as "Katrinagate," the scandal erupting from the lack of planning for the monster hurricane. Michael Adams, a professor at North Carolina State University who specializes in lexicology, said "truthiness" means "truthy, not facty."

"I think people who use grammar correctly are sexy because it means they're smart," says Laurie Rozakis, author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Grammar and Style. While Rozakis often has been a lone grammar gendarme - she notes that her children may need serious therapy for the embarrassment she's caused them with her compulsion to correct - she sees others joining in her mission. Her book, published in 1997, has sold more than 100,000 copies and is in its second printing. She believes it is part of a societal shift.

"I think there's going to be a return to more formal styles of dressing ... and we're moving away from sloppy grammar," she says. "There's more of a return to traditional values." The cause? The tightened economy and increased competition in the workplace, she says. "You whiten your teeth, you get laser surgery on your eyes, and you learn how to speak and you learn how to write," she says. Rozakis, a former high school English teacher and now an English professor at Farmingdale State University on Long Island, N.Y., has a penchant for correction. "I live and die by the red pen," she says.

Indeed, she has been known to pull it out to fix a sign at the grocery store. She once knocked on a stranger's door to tell him he should demand his money back because his wrought-iron address sign said "ninty-nine" instead of "ninety-nine."

Matchy-matchy

Match·y-match·y (mach' e\ mach' e\) / adj. / two or more things that go together, perhaps too well, in appearance, color or size; e.g., "Her pink KitchenAid mixer and pink floral kitchen towels are way too matchy-matchy."

Domestic

Do·mes·tic (do mes' tik) / adj. / pertaining to the family or household; sometimes dubiously followed by the word "goddess." Also refers to any artisanal food produced in or indigenous to this country, whether a carefully aged vinegar, a cured meat or a runny cheese. Some restaurants use it to suggest heightened quality, as in, "All of our farmstead cheeses are domestic."

Choco-dependent

Choc·o-de·pend·ent (ch ok o' di pen' dnt) / adj. / from the French choco-dependant, referring to a chocolate addict. A growing number of Americans are displaying the symptoms, which may include cold sweats, tremors and irritability that last until le fix - say, a square of François Pralus's 75-percent Madagascar bar -- is administered. Take your medicine!

"Heteroflexible" is someone who is usually -- but not always -- heterosexual.

"Supersize," the fast food menu word for big portions, can now be both an adjective and a verb, as in "supersize me."

And to "go commando" means "to wear no underpants."

At times, it helps to think of writing as carpentry. That way, writers and editors can work from a plan and use tools stored on their workbench. You can borrow a writing tool at any time. And here's a secret: Unlike hammers, chisels, and rakes, writing tools never have to be returned. They can be cleaned, sharpened, and passed on.

• Autographed Advance Reading Copy of Creepers (CD Books), the spine-tingling upcoming thriller from multiple New York Times bestselling author David Morrell.
  
  
• Autographed copy of Forced Mate by Rowena Cherry (Dorchester), the steamy futuristic romance novel which was a finalist for Best Futuristic Romance at the PEARL Awards.
  
  
• Set of two books: Sandstorm by James Rollins (Avon) with the new lenticular special edition cover and Map of Bones by James Rollins (William Morrow). These two exciting thrillers from the New York Times bestselling author are the perfect summer reading for fans of Dan Brown and Michael Crichton.
  
  
• Advance Reading Copy of the upcoming mystery Relics by Mary Anna Evans (Poisoned Pen Press), in which an archeologist finds more than she bargained for while investigating a centuries-old ethnic group which seems to have strange immunity to most modern diseases, including AIDS.

How hard could blogging be? You roll out of bed, turn on your computer, scan the headlines, think up some clever analysis while brushing your teeth, type it onto your site and you're off.

But as I discovered, blogging is no longer for amateurs or the faint of heart. Blogging -- if it's done well -- has evolved into an all-consuming art.

I wasn't the only newcomer to blogging last week. On the ballyhooed Huffington Post, Gary Hart, Walter Cronkite and David Mamet dipped their toes in the blogosphere as well.

I don't know how they'll fare, but I doubt that celebrity will attract readers for long. To succeed in blogging you need to understand it's a craft, with its own tricks of the trade. You need a thick skin. And you must put your life on hold to feed an electronic black hole.

What else did I learn by sitting in for Dan Drezner? That I'm not cut out for blogging.

The point to the List above is that even the best writers make these mistakes, but you can't afford to. The way manuscripts are thrown into the Rejection pile on the basis of early mistakes is a crime. Don't be a victim.