a great resource for writers: grammar girl

If you're a writer, did you know that grammarians today affirm

• that you can end sentences with prepositions?
  
  
• that you can happily split infinitives?
  
  
• that it's generally *incorrect* to say "I feel badly"?
  
  
• that you can begin sentences with "but" or "and"?

(Actually, this last one I learned back in August after consulting the Chicago Manual of Style (which is now online, btw). But while grammarians today almost uniformly approve of beginning sentences with conjunctions, some editors still do not prefer it. )

Maybe you knew all of these things, but most of them I only learned yesterday while listening to the grammar girl podcast.

Sometime before July 2006, CNN reports, one Mignon Fogarty got the idea to start a podcast on grammar:

"I was sitting in a coffee shop one day in Santa Cruz, California, on vacation and editing technical documents, because I work on vacation, and found so many grammar errors and it just hit me that grammar was something that I had expertise in that would lend itself to a short tip-based podcast," she said.

It's called grammar girl and CNN Reports it has at times reached #2 on iTunes and since July 2006 it's been downloaded 1.3 million times.

grammar girl knows her stuff, is almost invariably interesting, funny, and very informative.

ht: scot mcknight