Grammar Monster

Grammar Monster was launched as a website in September 2003. Grammar Monster was created in 2001 by Craig Shrives (a former British Army officer) as a 15-page pamphlet to assist coworkers with their punctuation and sentence patterns. When photocopies of the pamphlet circulated, one ended up on the desk of a senior officer, who asked Craig to present its contents to the officers of the unit as part of a staff-development session. As a result, the book was redesigned as a series of PowerPoint lessons. To make the site more interactive, he transferred his BASIC programming abilities from his adolescence to some basic JavaScript and included a confirmation test to each course. It was 2003, and the internet was still in its infancy.

Grammar Monster, as one of the earliest grammar sites on the internet, drew a lot of attention from the world's grammarians, who, predictably, killed the content. Craig initially defended the orthodoxy that was seen on far too many of Grammar Monster's pages. But, as the complaints and observations began to pour in, he learned to embrace them and utilize them as springboards for additional research to aid in the fine-tuning of the site's content. Because almost 60% of Grammar Monster's visitors are Americans, the site is written in American English. For example, the serial comma is used instead of the British "full stop" and "brackets", and the words "period" and "parentheses" are used instead of "full stop" and "brackets".

Website: grammar-monster.com