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

by Benjamin Dreyer

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.

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.

A good sentence, I find myself saying frequently, is one that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter how long it is, without having to double back in confusion because the writer misused or omitted a key piece of punctuation, chose a vague or misleading pronoun, or in some other way engaged in inadvertent misdirection. (If you want to puzzle your reader, that’s your own business.)

Let me say this about this: 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. A sentence that meanders its way to a prepositional finish is often, I find, weaker than it ought to or could be.

Quite possibly you know this comma as the Oxford comma—because, we’re told, it’s traditionally favored by the editors at Oxford University Press. But as a patriotic American, and also because that attribution verges on urbane legendarianism, I’m loath to perpetuate that story. Or you may be familiar with the term “serial comma,” though for me “serial” evokes “killer,” so no again. Whatever you want to call it: Use it. I don’t want to belabor the point; neither am I willing to negotiate 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.

I’ve been known to insist that the only thing one needs to say in defense of semicolons is that Shirley Jackson liked them.

In the bakery, above the rye bread, was a sign that read: TRY OUR RUGELACH! IT’S THE “BEST!” I was fascinated. This, as they say in the comic books, is my origin story.

As a lexicographer friend once confided over sushi, the dictionary takes its cues from use: If writers don’t change things, the dictionary doesn’t change things. If you want your best-seller to be a bestseller, you have to help make that happen. If you want to play videogames rather than video games, go for it. I hope that makes you feel powerful. It should.

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.)

I’d strongly suggest to the point of insistence that you avoid referring to two people by the same pronoun over the course of a single sentence; to be frank, I’d suggest that you avoid it over the course of a single paragraph. (I know a few authors of same-sex romance novels who are regularly driven to tears by this sort of thing.)

I’VE NEVER MET A WRITER OR OTHER WORD PERSON who didn’t possess a pocketful of language peeves and crotchets—words or uses of words that drive a normally reasonable person into unreasonable fits of pique, if not paroxysms of rage—and I doubt I’d trust anyone anyway who denied having a few of these bugaboos stashed away somewhere.

Clichés should be avoided like the plague.