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Our Story

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Grammar Monster was first registered as a website in September 2003. Here is our story.

(1) The Booklet. Written by Craig Shrives (a former British Army officer), Grammar Monster started life in 2001 as a 15-page booklet designed to help work mates with their punctuation and sentence structures.

(2) The PowerPoint Presentation. As photocopies of the booklet circulated, one found its way onto the desk of a senior officer, who instructed Craig to present its contents to the unit's officers as part of a staff-development morning. As a result, the booklet was reformatted and turned into a series of PowerPoint lessons.

(3) The First Website. Aware that he had created something potentially useful for a wider audience, Craig learned some HTML, re-reformatted the lessons, and uploaded them to the web. To make the site more interactive, he converted his teenage-years BASIC programming skills to some elementary JavaScript and added a confirmatory test to each lesson. This was 2003, the early days of the internet.
Grammar monster history

Grammar Monster's development

Being one of the first grammar sites on the web, Grammar Monster received a lot of attention from the world's grammarians, and, true to form, they slaughtered the content. At first, Craig defended the dogma that was evident on way too many of Grammar Monster's pages. However, as the criticisms and observations continued to flood in, he learned to embrace them and use them as leads for further research to help with tuning the site's contents.

(4) Today's Website and Books. Over the next seven years, the site grew, Craig's grammar sharpened, and the "attacks" reduced and softened. By 2010, there was sufficient safe and useful content to convert into a book, and "Grammar Rules" (later retitled "Grammar for Grown-ups") was published by Kyle Books for the UK market. It became a best-seller. Almost a decade later, "Smashing Grammar" was written to offer a more academic option to the vocational "Grammar Rules."

Grammar Monster continues to grow, and our content remains fully open to external scrutiny. We recognize that the observations of our visitors have helped us enormously to learn and grow, which is why we continue to include a "Help Us Improve" form at the bottom of every single page.

Onwards...

More about Grammar Monster

American or British English?

As over 60% of Grammar Monster's visitors are American, the site is written using US writing conventions. For example, the serial comma is used, commas appear inside quotation marks, and the words "period" and "parentheses" are used instead of the British "full stop" and "brackets."

Nevertheless, the site is intended for everyone seeking to improve their grammar, and where there are differences between the US and UK writing conventions, they are highlighted in the lessons.

Advertising and Data Protection

Advertising. The adverts are served through an external advertising company, predominantly using Google Ad Exchange. There are no more than three adverts on any page. While we do not control the topics of the adverts, we have opted out of displaying adult-only and gambling adverts.

Data Protection. Grammar Monster does not collect or store any personal information from your visit, and we do not take payments for anything. Even our tests that pass information between tutors and their students do so using URL extensions as opposed to data uploading and retrieval. (Privacy Policy)