Posted on 10/02/2007 8:54:12 AM PDT by Graybeard58
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — We just had to ask.
Grammar Girl, oh goddess of syntax, have you ever corrected graffiti in a bathroom or the language on a restaurant menu?
"No," said Mignon Fogarty, the 40-year-old writer and editor who has launched a campaign to make grammar — dare we say it? — fun.
"But I've just started a (flickr.com) group where people can post bad signs they've seen in the world. It's fun, and it's a great discussion starter."
Like this crime against grammar found in a job ad posted on mcflorida.com: "My friend's and I love working at McDonald's."
"My friend's WHAT? and I love working at McDonald's?" Fogarty said in a phone interview from her home outside Phoenix. "My friend's vegetarian sister and I love working at McDonald's?"
Thanks to her popular weekly podcasts with titles such as "The Asterisk (Trust Me About Grammar, Not About Baseball), Fogarty in just one year has become the country's go-to gal on grammar.
She knows to lie down for a nap and lay a book on a table.
She would never split an infinitive or effect change just for affect. Armed with a stack of trusty reference books in her home office, she rushes fearlessly into the thorny thickets of language — which vs. that, bad vs. badly — and solves the public's grammar dilemmas at her Web site, grammar.quickanddirtytips.com.
Last month alone her podcasts — that's a kind of Internet radio show you can listen to on an MP3 player or computer — were downloaded more than 600,000 times.
"I knew that there were people out there who cared about grammar, but I honestly didn't know there were so many of them," she said. "And I didn't know they were online."
Within months of its July 2006 launch, the Grammar Girl podcast was the most popular educational download on iTunes. It's been downloaded nearly 7 million times in its first year.
Fogarty's new "Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips to Clean up Your Writing" audio book is already one of the top five of 2007 on iTunes.
And oh, yeah, she's been on "Oprah," too.
Notice that the previous sentence began with the word "and." Grammar Girl said we could do it.
(We don't know what she would say about the "yeah.")
"I think of grammar as rules. Think of your 10-year-old nephew and how he will pore over the rules to some game," she said. "Grammar can be like that. It's just rules to the game of writing."
In cyberspace, Grammar Girl has cultivated fans all over the globe, most between the ages of 18 and 45 — truck drivers, seamstresses, genealogy buffs in Minnesota, soldiers in Iraq and, not surprisingly, a lot of teachers.
Fans have blessed her with reviews such as this one from a blog run by librarians at Kansas State University:
"Schoolhouse Rock might have gotten you through many a rough patch in middle-school English classes as you hummed the lyrics of Conjunction Junction ... but Schoolhouse Rock could only take us so far. Fortunately, we can all turn to Grammar Girl!"
Fogarty chalks up this clamor for grammar to e-mail.
"We're writing a lot more than we used to," she said. "About 50 percent of the messages I get are from people asking questions, and 50 percent are from people complaining about something they've seen other people do wrong."
Americans are no grammar clods, though, Fogarty said. "You'll hear people saying, 'Oh, kids today and their bad grammar.' I honestly don't think it's any worse than it used to be."
She could wag her finger, but Fogarty is no school marm, which probably accounts for her popularity.
"I think that what people like about my show is that it's fun and friendly and non judgmental," she said.
She has street cred, a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Washington in Seattle and a master's degree in biology from Stanford University.
She was a student journalist — that's where she learned how to use the AP Stylebook, the journalist's bible — and worked for her hometown newspaper outside of Seattle.
After college she wrote magazine articles and technical documents for biotech companies and produced health and science Web sites. She launched her first podcast, Absolute Science, in October 2005.
Absolute Science attracted listeners and even picked up a podcasting award, but "it wasn't a runaway success," Fogarty said. "Even though it was successful, it became clear that it was never going to take off."
For one thing, it took more than 10 hours a week to produce, and at nearly an hour it was too long, unlike other, shorter podcasts she liked to listen to. She needed a tighter, snappier show, something scripted, something she could do by herself.
"And I had been considering different topics. I had thought about financial tips, I had thought about green living tips, exercise tips, things that I'm kind of interested in," she said. "All were things floating around in my mind."
Her light bulb moment came one day while editing technical documents.
"I had gotten back a draft, and someone had changed a perfectly good 'that' to a 'which"' she said. "And I had changed it in the draft that went to them, so they had undone my edit. And it was wrong.
"I thought, 'This is such a simple rule, and people aren't taught these rules.' I was an English major at the University of Washington, and I never took grammar classes. How is that? I thought, 'Gosh, I must not be the only one."'
She still had the laptop, software and microphone she'd used for the Absolute Science podcast, and in spite of her husband's initial concern — "You're launching another podcast?" — she whipped out three Grammar Girl podcasts in about a week.
The format is simple. Each episode deals with one grammar dilemma, typically spawned by a fan question. The podcasts last only a few minutes, and Fogarty posts the transcripts of each on the Web site.
The most popular episodes have been about the things that tripped us up in school and obviously still do. Between or among? Who or whom? What's a comma splice?
Some of the questions are tied to current events.
Was Saddam Hussein hung or hanged, Grammar Girl?
He was hanged, she answered, offering, as she often does, a memory trick: Curtains are hung, people are hanged.
Miguel M. Morales likes Fogarty's quick-and-dirty style.
"I think she's a great resource for student journalists," said Morales, a Johnson County Community College student who links to the Grammar Girl site on his blog, latinoreporter.blogspot.com.
"As students we're constantly listening to lectures, and her podcast episodes are more like a quick mentoring session than a classroom lecture."
Helpful. Smart. Funny. Fans find Grammar Girl to be all those things. And yet, some of them get sweaty-palmed when they send e-mails to her. "People often end their e-mails with 'Please forgive me if I've made any errors,"' she said.
GRAMMAR GIRL'S FAVORITE RESOURCES
"Punctuate it Right!" Harry Shaw
"Common Errors in English Usage," Paul Brians
"Garner's Modern American Usage," Bryan A. Garner
"The Chicago Manual of Style," University of Chicago Press staff
And the No. 1 grammatical error is ...
"By far, the most common mistake is misusing the apostrophe 's' to make a plural," says Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl. "In Britain they call it the green grocer's apostrophe. You'll see the signs in the produce section — 'banana's $1.50.' I would say that is the No. 1 error that I see out in the world."
THE GRAMMAR GIRL EMPIRE
"Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips to Clean Up Your Writing," audiobook (Audio Renaissance, $9.95), is an hourlong CD with advice on punctuation marks and memorization tips for words often misused. A Grammar Girl hardcover book will be published next summer.
QDnow.com: Spring boarding off the success of Grammar Girl, Mignon Fogarty started a podcasting network that offers "Tips for Doing Things Better." Other podcast hosts include Mr. Manners, Money Girl, The Traveling Avatar, Legal Lad and the Mighty Mommy.
Readers: Send us your favorite grammatical pet peeves and we'll run them in a story. Send an e-mail to tosh@rep-am.com
We need a picture to determine guilt or innocence.
He was hanged, she answered, offering, as she often does, a memory trick: Curtains are hung, people are hanged.
He may have been hung too for all we know.
Guilty
No way, Jose !
The defendant pled guilty-even though he might have pleaded for mercy at sentencing.
As in:
Poor Nell, she begged and pleaded
But the Jury did not care:
They did not have a sofa
So they sent him to the chair !
She would never ... effect change just for affect.
Oops, Grammar Girl's gonna get ya for this goof, Lisa Gutierrez.
Better what? or better than who? Whom?
nice to have these type of people around, i don’t know much about grammar. My idea of a collective noun is a “garbage truck.”
And can somebody please give me the location of the institution that's teaching people that "women" is singular? I'd like to go burn it down.
"Tard" refers to the ping list members and not to the subject of the thread.
Bookmarked!
I always thought it was "pour" not "pore". I am admittedly not a grammar genius, but was I wrong??
Apparently, he knows more than one.
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