Dreyer's English

by Benjamin Dreyer

  You will note as well that nowhere in this book’s 300-odd pages do I ever (outside of innocuous sample sentences) use the pronoun “he” or “she” to refer to a person who isn’t specifically a he or a she. Neither will you encounter a “he or she.”

  Over the years I’ve found that the hardest nut to crack, pronounwise, is a book on child-rearing, as authors—unless they’re specifically writing about twins, and there are more books about raising twins than you might think—will want to individualize your teething baby, your rambunctious toddler, and your tantrum-throwing six-year-old. In these books, the singular “they” is virtually unavoidable. Yet for what it’s worth, I note that in one of my prize possessions, a tattered copy of Vogue’s Book of Etiquette, copyright 1923, the pronoun of choice for a nonspecific infant or child is “it.”

  A further thought:

  When I first drafted this section, I relegated the discussion of the use of pronouns for nonbinary people—people who do not identify as male or female—to a terse footnote acknowledging the relatively recent invention of alternate pronouns (I guess I’ve encountered the “ze”/“zir” system most frequently, but there are a number of others, which certainly impedes universal adoption) and the increasing use of what one might call a particularly singular “they,” blithely declared the matter cultural rather than copyeditorial, and excused myself from discussing it further.

  In other words, I cut and ran like hell.

  And yet: I now have a colleague whose pronoun of choice is “they,” and thus the issue is no longer culturally abstract but face-to-face personal, no longer an issue I’d persuaded myself was none of my business but one of basic human respect I chose—choose—to embrace. (I’m happy to call myself out for stubbornly avoiding the topic till it became personal. One is supposed to be better than that; one often isn’t.)

  For months after my colleague joined Random House, I dodged the issue—in speech and in email—by referring to said colleague by name and twisting myself into knots, as I have just stiltedly done, to avoid any pronoun other than “you.” It didn’t take long before I found myself bored with and embarrassed by the exertion, and one day in conversation, when I wasn’t even paying attention, the word “they” slipped out of my mouth, and that was the end of that.

  6.

  Here’s a sentence I was recently on the verge of making public:

  I think of the Internet as a real place, as real or realer than Des Moines.

  If you recognize immediately what’s the matter with that sentence, you’ve already grasped the concept of parallelism. If you haven’t—and don’t be hard on yourself if you haven’t, because you’re in the occasional company of just about every writer I’ve ever encountered—here is the correct version:

  I think of the Internet as a real place, as real as or realer than Des Moines.

  It’s all about that third “as.” How come? To cite the handy definition in Words into Type, “Parallelism is the principle that parts of a sentence that are parallel in meaning should be parallel in construction.” In this case, “as real” and “realer than” do not match in construction, as you’ll note if, in my original sentence, you flip them around:

  I think of the Internet as a real place, realer than or as real Des Moines.

  Sentences lacking parallelism are direly easy to construct. Here’s another:

  A mother’s responsibilities are to cook, clean, and the raising of the children.

  Which should correctly be:

  A father’s responsibilities are to cook, to clean, and to raise the children.

  Everything’s nice and matchy-matchy now.

  There’s something bracingly attractive about a sentence that brims with parallelism:

  He was not beholden to, responsible for, or in any other way interested in the rule of law.

  7.

  At some point in your life, perhaps now, it may occur to you that the phrase “aren’t I” is a grammatical trainwreck. You can, at that point, either spend the rest of your life saying “am I not?” or “amn’t I?” or embrace yet another of those oddball constructions that sneak into the English language and achieve widespread acceptance, all the while giggling to themselves at having gotten away with something.

  8.

  Flipping restlessly through the channels, John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was playing on TCM.

  Huston, we have a problem.

  Improperly attaching itself to the sentence’s subject—that is, “John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”—we in the copyediting business call that introductory bit (that is, “Flipping restlessly through the channels”) a dangler.

  This particular flavor of dangler is called in full a dangling participle, but not all danglers are participles, and anyway, using the term “dangling participle” mandates that you remember what a participle is. “Dangling modifier”—sometimes one runs into the term “misattached modifier” or “misplaced modifier”—makes for a better overall designation, but “dangler” is easier and quicker, so let’s just stick with that. Whatever we’re calling them, danglers are, I’d say, the most common error committed in otherwise competent prose and by far the most egregious type of error that regularly makes it to print. Authors write them, copy editors overlook them, proofreaders speed past them. It’s not a good look.

  Essentially, a sentence’s introductory bit and its main bit need to fuse correctly. Or, as I like to think of it, they need to talk to each other. If a sentence begins “Flipping restlessly through the channels,” then the sentence’s subject—more than likely, its very next word—has to tell us who’s holding the remote. It might be “I,” it might be “he,” it might be “Cecilia,” but it’s certainly not “John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

  Strolling through the park, the weather was beautiful. Nope.

  The weather was beautiful as we strolled through the park. Yup.

  Arriving at the garage, my car was nowhere to be found. Nah.

  When I arrived at the garage, my car was nowhere to be found. Yeah.

  Perhaps these sorts of errors seem obvious to you—particularly since we’re talking about them here and staring at them—but, as I said, they can slip right past you if you’re not paying attention.

  For instance, please hop back up a few paragraphs and take another look at the sentence that begins “Improperly attaching itself.”

  Yeah. Dangler.

  Here’s the opening sentence of Norman Mailer’s 1991 novel Harlot’s Ghost:

  On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the…Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.

  Now, unless it’s the recollections driving through the fog, this sentence has a problem.

  How to fix it? Easy:

  On a late-winter evening in 1983, as I drove through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, etc., etc., etc.

  The narrator is now driving, the recollections are now drifting, and all is right with the world.

  At the time of publication, after the dangler was pointed out, Mailer defended it. “The dangling modifier…was my decision, repeated several times over several months, to keep the sentence intact. I like the rhythm as it stands. I could not find a better one by fixing the sentence grammatically. For that matter, the meaning is clear….Dangling participles can offend a few readers intensely but the damage caused might add up to less than the rupture occasioned by straightening out the grammar and wrecking the good mood.”

  Well, let me put it to you this way:

  Having read that defense, Mailer is utterly unconvincin
g.

  Oh dear.

  Having read that defense, I find Mailer to be utterly unconvincing.*8

  I encounter danglers all the time. They frequently turn up in donated bits of praise generously provided by writers to support other writers—blurbs, that is. “An intoxicating mix of terror and romance, Olga Bracely has penned her best novel yet!”

  No.

  9.

  A sentence whose parts are misarranged to inadvertent comic effect can be a kind of dangler, but mostly I think of it simply as a sentence whose parts are misarranged to inadvertent comic effect.

  Or to advertent comic effect, if you’re Groucho Marx: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I’ll never know.”

  Or perhaps you’ve met that famous man with a wooden leg named Smith.

  10.

  You’d be amazed at how far you can get in life having no idea what the subjunctive mood is—as if it’s not bad enough that English has rules, it also has moods—but as long as I’ve brought the subject up, let’s address it.

  The subjunctive mood is used to convey various flavors of nonreality. For instance, it dictates the use of “were” rather than “was” in the Fiddler on the Roof song “If I Were a Rich Man” and in the frankfurter jingle that begins “I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener.”

  “I wish I were” rather than “I wish I was” seems to come naturally to most people, so let’s simply say amen to that and leave it be. The tricky part comes with the juxtaposition of:

  “if”

  “I,” “he,” or “she”*9

  “was” or “were”

  Now, if you’re lucky enough to be writing a sentence that includes not merely “if” but “as if,” you can simply grab on to “were” and run with it:

  I felt as if I were a peony in a garden of dandelions.

  He comports himself as if he were the king of England.*10

  But when you’ve got only an “if” in your hands, when do you use “was” and when do you use “were”?

  Well, here’s the thing: When I was a baby copy editor, I was told by my betters not to impose the subjunctive on writers who did not naturally use it. That is, if a writer wrote, “If I was president of the United States, I’d spend a bit more time in the Oval Office and a bit less time in Florida,” one should leave that writer, and that “was,” alone.

  That was a marching order I could, for a good long while, march with, and if you’re satisfied with it as well, then by all means march away.

  But if you’re feeling a little itchy, let’s make another run at it. Try this on for size: If you’re writing of a situation that is not merely not the case but is unlikely, improbable, or just plain impossible, you can certainly reach for a “were.”

  If I were to win the lottery tomorrow, I’d quit my job so fast it would make your head spin.

  If you’re writing of a situation that is simply not the case but could be, you might opt for a was.

  If he was to walk into the room right now, I’d give him a good piece of my mind.

  I tend to think of it thus: If I could insert the words “in fact” after “if I,” I might well go with a “was” rather than a “were.”

  Also, if you’re acknowledging some action or state of being that most certainly did occur—that is, if by “if” what you really mean is “in that”—you want a “was”:

  If I was hesitant to embrace your suggestion yesterday, it was simply that I was too distracted to properly absorb it.

  *1  I’d’ve made a “Mrs. Santa” joke here but for the fact that even I have standards.

  *2  What he did quite say—write, in a note, to be accurate—was “James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine, was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now. The report of my illness grew out of his illness; the report of my death was an exaggeration.”

  *3  I’m concerned with how you write, not how you speak, so if you’re prone to saying “It’s me” rather than “It is I” or inquiring “Who do you love?” rather than “Whom do you love?,” you’re A-OK tops in my book, and in the books of just about anyone else who aspires to speak English like a normal human being.

  *4  Jack Torrance’s verb of choice. I’d have gone with “make.” Either would be correct. Why? Because Jack chooses, perfectly justifiably, to view “all work and no play” as one big fat collective noun—a notional singular, we might call it, like “law and order” or “peas and carrots”—which means it takes a singular verb. Whereas I prefer, also with perfect justification, to see “all work and no play” as a compound subject requiring a plural verb.

  *5  I stress “in prose,” noting that in speech most of us use the singular “they” relentlessly and without a second thought. Such as in the sentence “Once you’ve hired a copy editor, please remind them not to allow the singular ‘they,’ OK?”

  *6  I think of this as the “Jane Austen Did It So It Must Be OK” school of wordsmithery, but it’s not a school I attend. I don’t punctuate like Jane Austen; I feel no compunction to otherwise English like Jane Austen. If our infinitely malleable language gains in expansion, invention, and reinvention, it can also, for the sake of precision and clarity, benefit from occasionally having its screws tightened, and not every centuries-old definition need be retained when a word has, over time, accumulated more meanings than are perhaps useful.

  *7  I’ve yet to see this sort of barbarism in competent finished prose, but as I do encounter it increasingly online, I’m making a preemptive strike against it here.

  *8  When Harlot’s Ghost was first published, and before Mailer’s apologia, the suggestion was ignobly and publicly bruited about by someone who should have been or at least known better that the error had slipped past the manuscript’s copy editor. It may well have, but there’s no reason to publicly hang an underpaid copy editor out to dry. I know what you’re thinking, and: No, it wasn’t me. But—now it can be told—I was one of the book’s freelance proofreaders. Did I heroically and brilliantly note the error, only to be ignored? I have absolutely no recollection. And I’ll bet I didn’t.

  *9  To be sure, “you” and “we” and “they” are always matched with “were,” so that’s one less problem—or three less/fewer problems—to contend with.

  *10  It’s indeed “the king of England,” not “the King of England.” One capitalizes a job title when it’s used as an honorific, as in “President Barack Obama,” but otherwise it’s “the president of the United States,” “the pope,” and the various other et ceteras. I know that this sort of thing makes royalists and excessively deferential writers go gray in the face, but let’s please turn down the hierarchical thinking and styling, OK?

  PUTTING ASIDE THE EXTENSIVE MECHANICAL WORK of attending to the rudiments of spelling, punctuation, grammar, etc., the styling of prose is very much about listening. An attentive copy editor should become attuned to and immersed in a writer’s voice to the point where the copy editor has so thoroughly absorbed the writer’s intentions that the process turns into a sort of conversation-on-the-page.

  Nowhere is this conversation more crucial than in the copyediting of fiction, where artistry, however you want to define that slippery concept, can outrank and outweigh notions of what might conventionally be deemed “correct”; where voice—eccentric, particular, peculiar as it may be—is paramount; and where a copy editor, however well-intentioned, who can’t hear what a writer is doing, or at least attempting to do, is apt to wreak havoc. Unfortunately, havoc is occasionally wreaked*1: I cringingly recall an instance in which one of the finest copy editors I know—so attentive, so sensitive, so adept that editors clamor for her services—crashed and burned on a job in which for some mysterious, unhappy reason she didn’t understand what the writer was doing generally an
d, specifically and perhaps worst of all, didn’t get his jokes, which she proceeded to flatten as if with a steamroller.*2 Happily, this sort of calamity is exceptionally rare, and it was easy enough, in this case, to put the writer’s nose back in joint by having his manuscript recopyedited, tip to toe, by another copy editor.

  Though I can’t here demonstrate in any practical fashion the elusive art of empathic listening, I can certainly let you in on some of the methodology—scrutinizing everything, taking nothing for granted, asking lots of questions, taking lots of notes, and performing scores of little tricks—a copy editor employs in the act of copyediting a work of fiction.*3 I can, as well, point out to you some of the glitches that, since I’ve repeatedly come face-to-face with them over the years, you may well find in your own work.

  THE REAL REALITY OF FICTION

  Fiction may be fictional, but a work of fiction won’t work if it isn’t logical and consistent.

  Characters must age in accordance with the calendar—that is, someone asserted to have been born in May 1960 must then be twenty-five in May 1985, forty in May 2000, etc.—and at the same pace as other characters: Two characters who meet at the ages of thirty-five and eighteen cannot, in a later scene, be fifty and merely twenty-six. Grandparents and great-grandparents, I’ve occasionally noted, are often said to have lived decades out of whack, in either direction, with what is reproductively possible.

  Keep track of the passage of time, particularly in narratives whose plots play themselves out, crucially, in a matter of days or weeks. I’ve encountered many a Friday arriving two days after a Tuesday, and third graders in math class on what, once one adds up the various “the next day”s, turns out to be a Sunday.