UW alum and popular podcaster, Mignon Fogarty is Grammar Girl

We just had to ask.

Grammar Girl, 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. I was hesitant to set it up because I felt like it had some of that 'gotcha' feel. But 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?"

She's not mocking. Really. That's just not Grammar Girl's style.

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 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."

The rules

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.

"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."

Grammar fans

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.

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 nonjudgmental," she said.

Talking the talk

She has street cred. Not only was she editor of Kentridge High School's newspaper in her hometown of Kent, she holds a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Washington 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.

After college she wrote magazine articles and technical documents for biotech companies and produced health and science Web sites.

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, and I never took grammar classes. How is that? I thought, 'Gosh, I must not be the only one.' "

She whipped out three Grammar Girl podcasts in about a week.

The people's podcasts

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 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."

Skipping judgment

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.

She suspects many people have been burned by those obnoxious grammar mavens skulking around on the Internet.

Yeah, you know who you are.

"A lot of times you'll see, in forums or discussion boards or comments on blogs, that someone will leave a message that has a typo or they've used a word incorrectly," Fogarty said.

"They're making a point about whatever the topic is ... and someone will jump in and discount their entire comment because they've made a grammar error. There's that mentality out there, this 'gotcha' mentality, that makes people afraid. ... And I'm not like that. I'm not going to wave my finger and say you're a bad person."