Grover's English is an open educational resource (OER), a repository of articles and resources related to writing instruction as well as general student advice, composed primarily with university students in mind. All are welcome to use these materials for theirs and others' benefits.
These materials are free to use and are presented ad-free, login-free, cookie-free, and paywall-free.
Each article is published under a Creative Commons license. Each page specifies which license it uses; the most common one is the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, which means you are free to share, copy, or adapt the material under the following terms:
- you must give appropriate credit,
- you may not use the material for commercial purposes, and
- if you adapt the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
Every attempt will be made to keep the URLs stable and consistent so that, if instructors link to these materials in their own classes, those links will stay valid for the foreseeable future.
Editorial Team
Managing Editors
Stephen David Grover, PhD
Associate Professor of English, Park University
Emily Gilliland Grover, PhD
Instructor of English, Notre Dame de Sion High School
Editorial Interns
Jasmine Miller (Spring 2022–present)
Emma Medill (Spring 2022–present)
History
This site originally began as a way for me (David) to keep my amateur web design skills sharp while avoiding some of the hassles of being an adjunct professor. In those days, I taught the same or similar classes at multiple universities simultaneously, and those universities did not use the same CMS—some used Blackboard, others Moodle or Canvas, other more obscure or short-lived software. Rather than constantly manage my course materials across all these platforms, I created Grover's English as a central repository for my syllabi, schedules, assignments, and other course materials.
In 2019, I obtained full-time employment at Park University as a professor of English, and I no longer needed Grover's English as a course site. But what to do with all the content I'd generated over more than a decade of teaching?
The answer came as I became familiar with Park's particular emphasis on making a quality education affordable and accessible to nontraditional students. One way this emphasis manifests is in the preference for low- or no-cost textbooks when possible; when developing courses, instructors are encouraged to use OERs and other open-access materials. Maybe I could not only use such materials in my courses—I thought—I can create such content and share it freely with students worldwide.
Thus this, the most recent iteration of Grover's English.
About the Creators
Stephen David Grover is a professor of English at Park University, a private, non-profit liberal arts school in the Kansas City area, where he teaches professional and technical communication. He earned a PhD in Technical Communication and Rhetoric from Texas Tech University and has worked professionally as a scholarly, technical, and literary editor for over 15 years.
Emily Gilliland Grover is a member of the English faculty at Notre Dame de Sion High School in Kansas City, Missouri. She earned a PhD in English, specializing in 18th-century British Literature, from Texas Tech University. In addition to her scholarship and work in the classroom, she has led a study abroad trip to the British Isles, organized a Jane Austen Yule Ball, directed a Book History Field Trip, and much more.
Acknowledgements
We thank Park University for its support of this project in various ways. Most specifically, a 2021 Faculty Development Endowment Fund grant allowed for significant development of the editorial process of the site, including the hiring of two editorial interns during the Spring 2022 semester.