what happens when you search out grammar writers on Substack?

It's pretty bleak on Substack for grammar writers.

Many grammar writers don't even seem to write about grammar; they write instead about staged readings and other performances, or they make personal announcements, or they write so infrequently (despite having what looks to me like an enviable number of followers) that I can see why their Substacks look so, bleak, empty, and moribund. Writing about grammar isn't for the timid, it seems. Here are some examples from a cursory search.

Filth & Grammar (sounds right up my alley, but alas...)

Subscriber numbers: 574
Last four posts: 11/26/24, 10/3/23, 5/30/22, 10/6/20
Recent article titles: "F & G Morphs," "Get Class in October!", "Finding Filth & Grammar," "Solitary Refinement for the Comics Enthusiast"

The Angry Grammarian (we are an angry bunch: people piss on the language)

Subscriber numbers: 1.3K+
Last four posts: 3/7/25, 11/25/24, 10/30/24, 10/16/24
Recent article titles: "New Works from the AG Fam," "An AG Guide to Not Bungling Your Holiday Cards," "The Punctuation Heard—or Imagined—'Round the World," "Could the Election Be Swung by the Passive Voice?"

Grammar Teacher (this better be good)

Subscriber numbers: 371
Last four posts: 2/22/22, 1/11/22, 12/15/21, 11/19/21
Recent article titles: "Coming Soon," "Aircraft Technical English," "Back at Last," "Free Job Vocabulary Book"

The Bad Grammar Bulletin (see the mistake in the title?)

Subscriber numbers: 967
Last four posts: 5/10/26, 5/4/26, 4/27/26, 4/20/26
Recent article titles: "The BGB for May 10th," "The BGB for May 4th," "The BGB for April 26th," "The BGB for April 19th"

At least that last Substack seems to be up to date and still productive. Let's see what its most recent article has to say:

The child woke up at two o’clock in the morning screaming his head off and demanding his grandfather, who lives fifty miles away and comes to visit twice a week, never at two o’clock in the morning. Lot of caffeine in my future for today. I wonder what the little guy was dreaming about.

Wow, that's disappointing. Not a thing about grammar—just a narrative followed by a brief, personal update under a picture, like in a blog. On the upside, the tone seems friendly enough, but I don't know whether that friendliness works for or against the stereotypical image of the perpetually angry/exasperated grammar Nazi disgusted with the mentally sloppy canaille that surrounds him. I'd vote against. We should be a bitter bunch.

So, based on this very superficial exploration of the grammar-scold side of Substack (there are, admittedly, many, many more "grammar" channels to look through, but who has the time?), it seems I'm one of the few people actually on task and doing focused work explicitly on grammar. Most of the so-called "grammar" Substacks are about things other than grammar, and quite a few seem to have been abandoned. So that's reassuring for me: I think I'm providing quality content for those who subscribe for free and for those who bother to get a paying subscription.

But after all that I've gone through regarding the title of my new ebook, I'm sensitive to the fact that my main Substack's name is BigHominid's Many Flavors (vague at best, and promising, but is it tempting enough to draw folks in?), and Bad Online English is only a subsection of a section I've labeled The Superficial (because it's free content and not that deep, i.e., it's not a curriculum and doesn't have any tests/quizzes). So I may have to set about renaming my supercategories, categories, and subcategories with better, punchier titles. Luckily, changing the banner (yet again!) ought to be easy enough since I have the original, layered Photoshop document. Only one layer to change.

I did see that one of the above-named grammar sites had an interesting short essay from 2024 about the advent of the 18th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (a.k.a. CMOS), and how the writer is more of an AP guy (referring to the Associated Press Stylebook). It was an interesting little quickie of a piece but about as rib-sticking as a marshmallow.

Upshot: I don't think I'm doing anything wrong in terms of content generation. Compared to these jokers, I'm a fucking machine when it comes to churning out content. There's room in the market for someone like me, for my particular voice. I don't see any significant contributions coming from any of the above publications. But I do need to work on my marketing, which is something I've always been shit at. Whoring yourself ain't easy.

I was prompted to look these sites up because I watched a video about increasing engagement on Substack, and the guy (who was apparently giving an interactive webinar at the time) said that leaving short comments on various pages is as valuable for getting engagement as publishing your own longer-form content is. Something clicked in my head, so I started searching out like-minded Substacks. Alas, the above publications are what I found, and if most of them are now inactive, then why bother commenting on them?

Well... the good fight goes on. Language deserves its defenders. I'm not a perfect defender and make my share of mistakes, but fewer and fewer of us defenders—however flawed—are left to hold the glaive of Law against the Earth.