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

by Benjamin Dreyer

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.

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.

Sometimes a comma makes no sense at all. Suddenly, he ran from the room. Makes it all rather less sudden, doesn’t it.

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 Well, truly I suppose they’re then the people’s pencils, but you get the point.

When Alan Bennett’s 1991 play The Madness of George III was filmed, we’re told, the title was tweaked to The Madness of King George so as not to alienate potential attendees—especially ignorant Yanks—who hadn’t seen The Madness of George and The Madness of George II. Though many such too-good-to-be-true stories turn out to be utter malarkey, this one’s partly for real.

If you’re writing a novel in English that’s set, say, in France, all of whose characters are ostensibly speaking French, do not pepper their dialogue with actual French words and phrases—maman and oui and n’est-ce pas—you remember from the fourth grade. It’s silly, cheap, obvious, and any other adjectives you might like if they’ll stop you from doing this sort of thing. (Whenever I encounter these bits of would-be local color, I assume that the characters are suddenly speaking in English.)

THANK YOU. (Yes, you're called out Kristin Hannah.)

You could certainly do worse than to follow the standard of Gore Vidal’s immortal Myra Breckinridge: “I am fortunate in having no gift at all for characterizing in prose the actual speech of others and so, for literary purposes, I prefer to make everyone sound like me.”

HÄAGEN-DAZS The name of the ice cream manufacturer is not Danish but gibberish intended to sound Danish.

The Gerber people are adamant that the term is theirs alone and should not be genericized into “onesie”; in this case I fear not only that the barn door is open but that the horse is halfway across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2.