Dreyer's English

by Benjamin Dreyer

  Copyright © 2019 by Benjamin Dreyer

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  A brief portion of this work was originally published by The Toast (the-toast.net) in “Shirley Jackson and Me” on August 4, 2015.

  The backgrounds of the title and part-title pages are from Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1981) and are used here by permission of the publisher.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Dreyer, Benjamin, author.

  Title: Dreyer’s English : an utterly correct guide to clarity and style / Benjamin Dreyer.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018027979 | ISBN 9780812995701 | ISBN 9780812995718 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Authorship—Technique.

  Classification: LCC PN145 .D74 2019 | DDC 808.02—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018027979

  Ebook ISBN 9780812995718

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Carole Lowenstein, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Keenan

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Part I: The Stuff in the Front

  Chapter 1: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (Your Prose)

  Chapter 2: Rules and Nonrules

  Chapter 3: 67 Assorted Things to Do (and Not to Do) with Punctuation

  Chapter 4: 1, 2, 3, Go

  Chapter 5: Foreign Affairs

  Chapter 6: A Little Grammar Is a Dangerous Thing

  Chapter 7: The Realities of Fiction

  Part II: The Stuff in the Back

  Chapter 8: Notes on, Amid a List of, Frequently and/or Easily Misspelled Words

  Chapter 9: Peeves and Crotchets

  Chapter 10: The Confusables

  Chapter 11: Notes on Proper Nouns

  Chapter 12: The Trimmables

  Chapter 13: The Miscellany

  Outro

  Things I Like

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  MARTHA. So? He’s a biologist. Good for him. Biology’s even better. It’s less…abstruse.

  GEORGE. Abstract.

  MARTHA. ABSTRUSE! In the sense of recondite. (Sticks her tongue out at GEORGE) Don’t you tell me words.

  —Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

  I am a copy editor. After a piece of writing has been, likely through numerous drafts, developed and revised by the writer and by the person I tend to call the editor editor and deemed essentially finished and complete, my job is to lay my hands on that piece of writing and make it…better. Cleaner. Clearer. More efficient. Not to rewrite it, not to bully and flatten it into some notion of Correct Prose, whatever that might be, but to burnish and polish it and make it the best possible version of itself that it can be—to make it read even more like itself than it did when I got to work on it. That is, if I’ve done my job correctly.

  On the most basic level, professional-grade copyediting entails making certain that everything on a page ends up spelled properly. (The genius writer who somehow can’t spell is a mythical beast, but everyone mistypes things.) And to remind you of what you already likely know, spellcheck and autocorrect are marvelous accomplices—I never type without one or the other turned on—but they won’t always get you to the word you meant to use. Copyediting also involves shaking loose and rearranging punctuation—I sometimes feel as if I spend half my life prying up commas and the other half tacking them down someplace else—and keeping an eye open for dropped words (“He went to store”) and repeated words (“He went to the the store”) and other glitches that can take root during writing and revision. There are also the rudiments of grammar to be minded, certainly—applied more formally for some writing, less formally for other writing.

  Beyond this is where copyediting can elevate itself from what sounds like something a passably sophisticated piece of software should be able to accomplish—it can’t, not for style, not for grammar (even if it thinks it can), and not even for spelling (more on spelling, much more on spelling, later)—to a true craft. On a good day, it achieves something between a really thorough teeth cleaning—as a writer once described it to me—and a whiz-bang magic act.

  Which reminds me of a story.

  A number of years ago I was invited to a party at the home of a novelist whose book I’d worked on. It was a blazingly hot summer afternoon, and there were perhaps more people in attendance than the little walled-in garden of this swank Upper East Side townhouse could comfortably accommodate.

  As the novelist’s husband was a legendary theater and film director,*1 there were in attendance more than a few noteworthy actors and actresses, so while sweating profusely I was also getting in a lot of happy gawking.

  My hostess thoughtfully introduced me to one actress in particular, one of those wonderfully grand theatrical types who seem, onstage, to be eight feet tall and who turn out, more often than not, to be quite compact, as this one was, and surprisingly lovely and delicate-looking for a woman who’d made her reputation playing, for lack of a better word, dragons.

  It seemed that the actress had written a book.

  “I’ve written a book,” she informed me. A memoir, as it turned out. “And I must tell you that when I was sent the copyedited manuscript and saw it all covered with scrawls and symbols, I was quite alarmed. ‘No!’ I exclaimed. ‘You don’t understand!’ ”

  By this time she’d taken hold of my wrist, and though her grip was light, I didn’t dare to find out what would happen if I attempted to extricate myself from it.

  “But as I continued to study what my copy editor had done,” she went on, in a whisper that might easily have reached a theater’s uppermost seats had she wanted it to, “I began to understand.” She leaned in close, staring holes into my skull, and I was hopelessly enthralled. “ ‘Tell me more,’ I said.”

  Pause for effect.

  “Copy editors,” she intoned, and I can still hear every crisp consonant and orotund vowel, all these years later, “are like priests, safeguarding their faith.”

  Now, that’s a benediction.*2

  I wandered into my job nearly three decades ago—a lot of people wandered into careers in those days; you could just sort of do things—after a few too many years post-university waiting on tables and bartending, attending revival-house double features, and otherwise faffing about. I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up, which is a problem when you’ve already grown up, but thanks to the intercession of a writer friend and a leap of faith on the part of his production editor—that’s the person in a publishing house who squires a book through the copyediting and proofreading process—I found myself doing freelance proofreading work: an assignment here and an assignment there until, after a while, I was taking on this sort of work full-time.

  Now, proofreading—because that’s your entrée into the business, especially if you have no experience whatsoever�
�is a basic and mechanical process, and my first jobs were simply to ensure that everything on the copyedited manuscript pages (you kept that stack to your left) had made its way properly onto the accompanying typeset pages (you kept that stack on the right). Mind you, we’re even further back in the paper era than in the garden-party story, so what I was reading on the manuscript pages included not only the writer’s original typing but layers of rewriting and revision in two sets of handwriting—the writer’s own and the copy editor’s—to say nothing of the copyeditorial directives indicated by those mysterious scrawls and symbols. Proofreading requires a good deal of attention and concentration, but it’s all very binary, very yes/no: Something is right or something is wrong, and if it’s wrong you’re expected to notice it and, by way of yet more scrawling, repair it. It’s like endlessly working on one of those spot-the-difference picture puzzles in an especially satanic issue of Highlights for Children.

  As I dutifully worked away, I became increasingly fascinated by what I observed on the manuscript pages, a kind of conversation in dueling colored pencils between the writer and the copy editor. Because often—almost invariably—the copy editor had gone well beyond fixing misspellings, rearranging punctuation, and attending to errant subject-verb agreement and was digging deeper, more thoughtfully, and considerably more subjectively into the writer’s prose: deleting words a sentence might live without, adding a word here or there in one that was perhaps too tightly constructed for its own good, reordering a paragraph so that it built its case more strongly, calling out the overuse of a writer’s pet adjectives or adverbs. The copy editor might also suggest that a bit of prose was clumsy (“AU: AWK?” would be jotted in the margin)*3 or that a turn of phrase was stale and shopworn (“AU: CLICHÉ?”). Occasionally, if the copy editor had determined that the same point had been made one too many times, or was simply too obvious to be made at all, an entire sentence might simply be crossed out, and the note in the margin would read—saucily, I thought—“AU: WE KNOW.”

  That isn’t to say that every suggestion a copy editor made was embraced by the writer. Though changes were often tacitly accepted simply by being left in place—or an author would indicate assent by crossing out the question mark in the circled “OK?” the copy editor had jotted in the margin—occasionally a correction or revision was itself crossed out, a row of percussive dots was penciled in underneath the original text, and the word “STET”—that’s Latin, I learned, for “let it stand,” a.k.a. “keep your hands to yourself”—would be marked alongside the revised, then unrevised text, occasionally accompanied by an exclamation point, also occasionally accompanied by a choice word or two of dissent.*4

  And that’s how I learned to copyedit: by observing copyediting, how it was done and how writers responded to it, by taking note of the sorts of flaws, ranging from more or less inarguable errors of grammar to more or less arguable missteps of style and taste, and how copy editors addressed them. (More or less, more or less: Truly, I’m not hedge sitting. There are fewer absolutes in writing than you might think. More on that soon, and repeatedly.)

  Copyediting is a knack. It requires a good ear for how language sounds and a good eye for how it manifests itself on the page; it demands an ability to listen to what writers are attempting to do and, hopefully and helpfully, the means to augment it. One can, and certainly should, study the subject, if one is to do this sort of work professionally. Lord knows the world does not lack for books about grammar and word usage. But I do think that it’s a craft whose knowledge can only be built on some mysterious predisposition. (The one thing I know that most copy editors have in common is that they were all early readers and spent much of their childhoods with their noses pressed into books.) As one of my colleagues once described it: You’re attempting to burrow into the brains of your writers and do for, to, and with their prose what they themselves might have done for, to, and with it had they not already looked at each damn sentence 657 times.

  Which brings me, somewhat circuitously, to you, dear reader—I’ve always wanted to say that, “dear reader,” and now, having said it, I promise never to say it again—and why we’re here.

  We’re all of us writers: We write term papers and office memos, letters to teachers and product reviews, journals and blog entries, appeals to politicians. Some of us write books. All of us write emails.*5 And, at least as I’ve observed it, we all want to do it better: We want to make our points more clearly, more elegantly; we want our writing to be appreciated, to be more effective; we want—to be quite honest—to make fewer mistakes.

  As I said, I’ve been doing this sort of work for a long time now, and my favorite thing about it is still the pleasure of assisting writers and conversing with them on the page, even if the page now tends to be not paper on my desk but a Word file on my screen.

  This book, then, is the next conversation. It’s my chance to share with you, for your own use, some of what I do, from the nuts-and-bolts stuff that even skilled writers stumble over to some of the fancy little tricks I’ve come across or devised that can make even skilled writing better.

  Or perhaps you’re simply interested in what one more person has to say about the series comma.

  Let’s get started.

  No. Wait. Before we get started:

  The reason this book is not called The Last Style Manual You’ll Ever Need, or something equally ghastly, is because it’s not. No single stylebook can ever tell you everything you want to know about writing—no two stylebooks, I might add, can ever agree on everything you want to know about writing—and in setting out to write this book, I settled on my own ground rules: that I would write about the issues I most often run across while copyediting and how I attempt to address them, about topics where I thought I truly had something to add to the conversation, and about curiosities and arcana that interested or simply amused me. And that I would not attempt to replicate the guidance of the exhaustive books that still and always will sit, and be constantly referred to, on my own desk.*6 And, I should add, that I would remember, at least every now and then, to own up to my own specific tastes and noteworthy eccentricities and allow that just because I think something is good and proper and nifty you don’t necessarily have to.

  Though you should.

  So, then, in the spirit of selective and idiosyncratic and, I hope, useful advice:

  Let’s get started.

  *1  It’s not name-dropping if I don’t drop the name, right?

  *2  Oh, OK. The actress is Zoe Caldwell and the book in question is a charming, svelte little memoir called I Will Be Cleopatra. Seek it out.

  *3  “AU” is “author,” and one needed to specify this because on occasion one was marginally addressing the “COMP,” that is to say the compositor, or typesetter.

  *4  “Can you give an example?” my own editor requested while we were working over this passage. Well, let’s see. There was that one writer who, in overriding a copy editor’s attempt to repair one of his (I must point out for the historical record) godawful sentences, sniffily noted “It’s called style” in the margin. And the one who, in response to a perfectly demure piece of editorial advice, scrawled in what was either red crayon or blood, “WRITE YOUR OWN FUCKING BOOK.”

  *5  We also, many of us, text and tweet, and these activities have spawned their own rules, all of which lie outside the realm of this book.

  *6  For the record: Words into Type, a splendid volume that long ago went out of print but copies of which are easily found online, and The Chicago Manual of Style, whose edicts I don’t always agree with but whose definitive bossiness is, in its way, comforting. I also commend to you Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, and of course—I mean, of course—you need to own a dictionary: Get yourself a copy of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary—in its eleventh edition, as of this writing. Whenever in this book I refer to the big fat stylebooks, these are the books I�
��m talking about.

  HERE’S YOUR FIRST CHALLENGE:

  Go a week without writing

  very

  rather

  really

  quite

  in fact

  And you can toss in—or, that is, toss out—“just” (not in the sense of “righteous” but in the sense of “merely”) and “so” (in the “extremely” sense, though as conjunctions go it’s pretty disposable too).

  Oh yes: “pretty.” As in “pretty tedious.” Or “pretty pedantic.” Go ahead and kill that particular darling.

  And “of course.” That’s right out. And “surely.” And “that said.”

  And “actually”? Feel free to go the rest of your life without another “actually.”*1

  If you can last a week without writing any of what I’ve come to think of as the Wan Intensifiers and Throat Clearers—I wouldn’t ask you to go a week without saying them; that would render most people, especially British people, mute—you will at the end of that week be a considerably better writer than you were at the beginning.

  CLARIFICATION NO. 1

  Well, OK, go ahead and write them—I don’t want you tripping over your own pencil every time you compose a sentence—but, having written them, go back and dispose of them. Every single one. No, don’t leave that last one intact just because it looks cute and helpless. And if you feel that what’s left is somehow missing something, figure out a better, stronger, more effective way to make your point.

  CLARIFICATION NO. 2