Grammar-related blogs and podcasts
Grammar Gang
Semi-colons get a bad press. They have been described as the most feared form of punctuation (right up there ahead of apostrophes). Here at the Grammar Gang, we love them: the rules are simple to apply, and when you use them correctly, the outcome will be a tighter and more elegant style.
Found this on the Purdue OWL site. by Sep 22
Mr. Verb
Russ Feingold is a Wisconsin icon. If you go around Madison, you can easily find bumper stickers that say "Russ Feingold will always be MY senator". He lost his last election to Ron Johnson (who's making news on his own, despite being generally invisible in the Senate) in the surge that brought Scott Walker to power, and he steadfastly refused to run for governor against Walker.
This blogger writes about language a bit more generally, but he always has some interesting English grammar topics. by Aug 20
Motivated Grammar
The terms descriptivism and prescriptivism get thrown around a lot, and it seems most everyone says one of the words with a sort of dripping scorn that wouldn’t be out of place on the word “Communist” in the Army-McCarthy hearings.
This blog's written by a computational psycholinguist, but don't let that scare you off. He covers interesting topics, with a big focus on why people say things the way they do in English. http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/ by Aug 20
Several years ago, when Randall Munroe’s xkcd web comic still consisted mostly of scanned images of doodles from his graph-paper notebooks, I got a laugh out of this one: Although Munroe didn’t include ass in this survey, I’d say the same adjectives that you don’t find intensified with fucking or as shit , you also don’t find intensified with ass . A lot of the discussion on the xkcd forum focused on which adjectives could and couldn’t be intensified in these ways, but as I thought about these three obscenity-based intensifiers, it occurred to me that even one and the same adjective can’t always be intensified by all three of these intensifiers.
Literal-Minded
This blogger has a PhD in linguistics, so his entries are a bit more technical at times, but very accessible. by Aug 20
Grammar Grater | Podcasts | Minnesota Public Radio News
About the Podcast Grammar Grater® is a weekly podcast about English words, grammar and usage for the Information Age. Because we live in a time of e-mail, blogs, instant messaging, even online product reviews—everybody's a writer.
This podcast, like Grammar Girl, is aimed at native English speakers. From right here in MN! by Aug 20
Grammar Girl :: Quick and Dirty Tips ™
This popular blog / podcast focuses on "quick and dirty tips" on vocabulary, grammar and usage for native English speakers. There's a heavy focus on the difference between how you can say something vs. how you should formally write something. by Aug 20