The New Grammar Podcast on the Block

It did­n’t seem like an obvi­ous block­buster at first — at least not to me — but The Gram­mar Girl (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) has remained one of the most down­loaded edu­ca­tion­al pod­casts on iTunes. To be pre­cise, each week, about 100,000 peo­ple down­load these short pod­casts that offer “quick and dirty tips” for clean­ing up your writ­ing. And thanks to the endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of her free audio lessons, plus an appear­ance on Oprah, Mignon Fog­a­r­ty, the cre­ator of the Gram­mar Girl, has also man­aged to spin-off an audio­book ($9.95) that has dri­ven strong sales. Plus she’s got a good, old-fash­ioned pulp book some­where still in the pipeline.

It was per­haps, then, only a mat­ter of time before Fog­a­r­ty faced some friend­ly com­pe­ti­tion. The Gram­mar Grater (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) is a new pod­cast that approach­es lan­guage issues from a slight­ly dif­fer­ent angle. It focus­es on “Eng­lish words, gram­mar and usage for the Infor­ma­tion Age,” which is to say that it deals with gram­mar issues that often arise when we write emails, blog posts, instant mes­sages and beyond. Luke Tay­lor is the host, and, with him, you get a well-pro­duced, often enter­tain­ing, pod­cast that touch­es on gram­mar issues that you’re bound to encounter in your dai­ly elec­tron­ic writ­ing. Give the Girl and the Grater both a lis­ten and you’ll almost cer­tain­ly learn small bits that’ll make a big dif­fer­ence.

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