In my search for useful grammar websites, I've also explored those not specifically designed for classroom use.

Grammar Girl is one page of a larger website called Quick and Dirty Tips. Other pages offer advice from characters such as Legal Lad, Make-it-Green Girl, and Mighty Mommy. Mignon Fogarty hosts this podcast, designed to, in its own words, render “complex grammar questions simple with memory tricks.” Although users are welcome to contact the site by e-mail (feedback@quickanddirtytips.com ), the page is not truly interactive. Users with questions can, however, call the voicemail line (206-338-4475), with the enticing incentive that Grammar Girl “might use [your question] in the show!” Themed around particular grammatical problems, episodes are relatively short, fairly entertaining, extremely informative, and also available in printed format. Additionally, the site allows users to post comments about each episode.

I particularly enjoyed Episode 138 from September 26 of this year. Titled “Why Gruntled Isn’t a Word,” the podcast focused on words that appear to have a negative prefix yet cannot stand alone. The answer was given by guest Bonnie Trenga. Apparently most words that can only be used in negative form originally had positive meanings as well, but those words are now archaic. She traces disgruntled to Middle English, disheveled to French, and disaster to Latin. The most interesting part is that she did all of this etymological work using only a standard dictionary. Students listening to this podcast would, then, get a double lesson. First, they’d get to hear fascinating (but not very useful) facts about the origins of a few random words. But they would also benefit from the side lesson in using the dictionary to find more than spelling or pronunciation. Depending on the class taught, the instructor could use this podcast to launch a number of useful activities. (That is, literature students could learn to use the OED. Rhetoric students could examine the same words in newspaper articles from different eras, exploring how connotations change over time.)

Some podcasts teach less specific lessons about broad grammatical concepts, but as an aide for teaching grammar, this site would probably work best if incorporated into a lesson by an instructor. Students cannot use this site to answer their specific grammar questions. Their questions may be addressed on the show, but the chances of their queries being chosen seem roughly the same as those of people writing in to an advice column.