"an IO monad is a delayed action that will be executed as soon as that action is needed for further evaluation of the program."
I'm not sure I like this, as it seems to confuse the issue. An expert should correct me if I'm wrong, but monads in and of themselves don't depend on laziness. Rather, *everything* in haskell is lazy, unless explicitly strict-ified. As for the rest of your email, I don't necessarily disagree, but don't find it particularly helpful either. Which may, of course, be a personal thing. For me, I think the key to monads is to really understand 2 things about them: 1.) They are simply type constructor classes 2.) Monads are about sequencing For point 2, think about the two main things you have to define to create an instance of a monad: (>>=) :: m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b That is, you have two monadic actions, m a and m b, and bind says how to take the result of the first and fit it into the second -- in sequence! (>>) :: m a -> m b -> m b Again, we have 2 monadic actions that we're composing, in sequence. This time, we're just discarding the result of the first.