In this Week in Writing, we’re celebrating the birthdays of Charles Dickens and Gay Talese. Happy birthday, gents. Plus, we bookmark a blog about 39 blogs for writers, nitpick grammar in the digital age (or not), and more.

Charles Dickens’s birthday and the age of verbosity.

This week marked the 200th anniversary of Dickens’ birth, prompting a flood of retrospectives on his work. A blog from The Washington Post seemed most apropos because it celebrates the author’s verbosity in a time when brevity is all the rage.

“These days, some strive for clarity and brevity,” writes Alexandra Petri. “Others write online fan-fiction about rabbits in the first person. Dickens wrote elastically—he could expand and contract time and space, prolong an evening for a chapter or skim through a whole revolution.”

Now, imagine the opening sentence of “A Tale of Two Cities” jammed into a tweet: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it”—ah, forget it.

Read Petri’s blog here.

Born Talese.

Another famous writer celebrated a birthday this week. Gay Talese, the founder of New Journalism, turned 80. If you haven’t read his seminal work “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” or one of my personal favorites on Joe DiMaggio, stop reading this column immediately and click over to those stories. Don’t worry, we’ll wait …

Welcome back.

On the occasion of Talese’s birthday, Dandyism.net writes of the journalist’s fashion sense, and let me tell you, the dude’s got style. Consider this a must-read for the sartorial-minded writer.

Read the story here.

Nitpicking grammar in the digital age.

Ever see a tweet, Facebook update, or text message with a language error and have to suppress every urge in your body to snap back a snarky response, something like: “Yes, pubic humiliation is far worse than public humiliation”?

As a general rule, don’t.

The Chicago Tribune interviewed a couple of grammarians—among them Mignon Fogarty (a.k.a. Grammar Girl), who made an appearance on PR Daily this week—who offered tips for responding to grammar and language mistakes in the age of social media.

“Because I'm Grammar Girl, I always proofread my mobile messages and go back and correct errors," Fogarty told the Tribune. “But with other people, I ignore any errors—I'm usually just grateful to get a quick response.”

There are exceptions, however. And you can read about those here.

Best blogs for writers to read in 2012.

Robert Lee Brewer, a poet and editor, compiled a list of 39 blogs for writers. I haven’t gone through all of them yet, but I’ve bookmarked his blog post and plan to spend some time with it this weekend. You should, too.

Read Brewer’s blog post here.

(via Writer’s Digest)

The Reactionary.

This is Christopher Hitchens’ final essay for The Atlantic. The piece is about English writer G. K. Chesterton. Hitchens, who died in December at the age of 62, researched and wrote the essay in a Houston hospital room during his losing battle with cancer.

Benjamin Schwarz, who served as Hitchens editor at The Atlantic, described this process in a tribute to the late writer:

“The resulting essay taxed Christopher. Since his death, many have remarked on the ease with which Hitch tossed off piece after piece. I have met no one who could write as quickly—but nor have I met anyone as earnest as Hitch was about his responsibilities as a writer. For this piece he read some 1,700 pages in his Houston hospital room, and because of his illness his writing sessions were painful, hard-won, and abbreviated.”

I had little interest in Chesterton, but as usual found Hitchens piece informative and insightful and well worth the time to read it. It’s a damn shame it’s his last .

Read it here.

Evan Peterson usually compiles the Week in Writing column. He is off this week. Michael Sebastian is the managing editor of PR Daily.