Dear SV:

You wrote:
> I need to know who is the author and knowledge authority behind English Plus Grammar (esp. punctuation). I agree with the information and have used it in an exchange of views in correcting someone but have been challenged to know what “authority” there is behind this knowledge. For that reason I am wondering on what you base your information and the background/education, etc. of any authors.
>
Most of my material was gathered from research of various high school grammar texts, writing style sheets and guidelines (e.g., New York Times, U. of Chicago), and some popular grammar and writing books. I have a degree in
English from Harvard and have been teaching English at a private school in Connecticut for 20 years. It has been about ten years since I did most of the original work, so I am not sure I can recall all the texts, but they included Prentice-Hall, Warriner’s, Fowler’s, and McDougall-Littel. In some cases I went back to nineteenth century sources such as Linsley and Webster. In a few instances, especially with controversial topics like preposition at the end of a sentence or split infinitive, I consulted concordances of Bibles and famous authors to look for patterns.

For the spelling component of Grammar Slammer Deluxe, I mostly took my cue from errors I had noted in writings of many kinds–in some cases, even my own mistakes. For the spelling rules, I used some of the same sources named above, and, in some cases, put my own together based on observable patterns.

I hope this helps.