Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

by Benjamin Dreyer

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.

just because I think something is good and proper and nifty you don’t necessarily have to. Though you should.

Go a week without writing very rather really quite in fact

And if you feel that what’s left is somehow missing something, figure out a better, stronger, more effective way to make your point.

that a sentence’s subject and its verb should agree in number, for instance. Or that in a “not only x but y” construction, the x and the y must be parallel elements.

Let’s call these reasons the Four C’s, shall we? Convention. Consensus. Clarity. Comprehension.

An “And” or a “But” (or a “For” or an “Or” or a “However” or a “Because,” to cite four other sentence starters one is often warned against) is not always the strongest beginning for a sentence, and making a relentless habit

You may find that you don’t need that “And” at all. You may find that your “And” or “But” sentence might easily attach to its predecessor sentence with either a comma or a semicolon. Take a good look, and give it a good think.

Writers who are not so adept at linking their sentences habitually toss in a “But” or a “However” to create the illusion that a second thought contradicts a first thought when it doesn’t do any such thing. It doesn’t work, and I’m on to you.

when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

Ending a sentence with a preposition (as, at, by, for, from, of, etc.*6) isn’t always such a hot idea, mostly because a sentence should, when it can, aim for a powerful finale and not simply dribble off like an old man’s unhappy micturition.

Contractions are why God invented the apostrophe, so make good use of both.

In a sentence written in the passive voice, the thing that is acted upon is frontloaded, and the thing doing the acting comes at the end. In either case, we can easily agree that clowns are terrifying.

If you can append “by zombies” to the end of a sentence (or, yes, “by the clown”), you’ve indeed written a sentence in the passive voice.

That said, do wield your fragments with a purpose, and mindfully. I lately find them, particularly in fiction, too often used to establish a sort of hairy, sweaty, unbathed masculine narrative voice, and what they end up sounding like is asthma.

particularly those in which the word “whether” is being used as a straight-up “if,” no “or not” is called for.

you can delete the “or not” from a “whether or not” and your sentence continues to make sense, then go ahead and delete it. If not, not.

Feel free to end a sentence shaped like a question that isn’t really a question with a period rather than a question mark. It makes a statement, doesn’t it.

Only godless savages eschew the series comma.

No sentence has ever been harmed by a series comma, and many a sentence has been improved by one.

“Only” commas (except at the very ends of sentences, they travel in pairs) are used to set off nouns that are, indeed, the only one of their kind in the vicinity, as in, say,

If you’re about to offer a piece of information that’s crucial to your sentence, offer it up without a comma and with a “that”: Please fetch me the Bible that’s on the table.

If what follows a colon is a full sentence, begin that full sentence with a capital letter, which signals to your reader: What’s about to commence includes a subject, a verb, the works, and should be read as such.

If Jeanette has some pencils and Nelson has some pencils and Jeanette and Nelson are not sharing their pencils, those pencils are: Jeanette’s and Nelson’s pencils But if Jeanette and Nelson reject individual ownership and pursue a socialist policy of collectivization for the betterment of humankind, those pencils are now: Jeanette and Nelson’s pencils

Sic is Latin for “thus,” and one uses it—traditionally in italics, always in brackets—in quoted material to make it clear to your reader that a misspelling or eccentricity or error of fact you’re retaining for the sake of authenticity in said quoted material is indeed not your misspelling or eccentricity or error of fact but that of the person you’re quoting.

…which it said had been “a labor [sic] of love.”

One does not, as in the rugelach example cited above, use quotation marks for emphasis. That is why God invented italics.

insouciance

“manoeuvre,” which always looks to me as if its pronunciation might well be the sound of a cat coughing up a hairball.

“The verb in a relative clause agrees with the antecedent of the relative pronoun, which is the nearest noun or pronoun and is often the object of a preposition, as in the phrase one of those who [or] one of the things that.”