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

by Benjamin Dreyer

The English language, though, is not so easily ruled and regulated. It developed without codification, sucking up new constructions and vocabulary every time some foreigner set foot on the British Isles—to say nothing of the mischief we Americans have wreaked on it these last few centuries—and continues to evolve anarchically. It has, to my great dismay, no enforceable laws, much less someone to enforce the laws it doesn’t have.

Convention. Consensus. Clarity. Comprehension.

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

In copyediting, one is listening to the text not sentence by sentence but paragraph by paragraph and page by page, for a larger sense of sweep and rhythm.

If writers don’t change things, the dictionary doesn’t change things.

I hope that makes you feel powerful. It should.

(Staring at words is always a bad idea. Stare at the word “the” for more than ten seconds and reality begins to recede.)

Even under the most regular circumstances, all a copy editor can do is advise; consent or nonconsent is up to the writer.

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.

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

The lesson being that notwithstanding all the commonly asserted rules of prose one has been taught in school or read about in stylebooks, authors do, as Wolcott Gibbs recognized and, now, so do I, have their preservable styles, and the role of a copy editor is, above all else, to assist and enhance and advise rather than to correct—indeed, not to try to transform a book into the copy editor’s notion of what a good book should be but, simply and with some measure of humility, to help fulfill an author’s vision and make each book into the ideal version of itself.

The important thing to remember about peeves and crotchets is that your own peeves and crotchets reflect sensible preferences based on a refined appreciation of the music and meaning of the English language, and that everyone else’s are the products of diseased minds.

You are free, though, to dislike such bureaucratese phrases as “grow the economy” because they’re, to use the technical term, icky.

To ball one’s eyes out would be some sort of sporting or teabagging mishap.

You’re not going to like this: Up until the late eighteenth century or so, no one particularly cared whether you chose to lie down or lay down, so long as you got horizontal. Then some word busybodies got wrought up on the subject, a rule was born, and schoolchildren (and writers) have been tortured on the subject ever since.

Mostly one wants to strike a balance between one’s editorial preferences and the preferences of the people who own the names.

because that is how the Star Wars people like it. And if you challenge them on any of these points, they’ll cut your hand off. True story.

There’s no rule without an exception (well, mostly), there’s no thought without an afterthought (at least for me), there’s always something you meant to say but forgot to say.