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

by Benjamin Dreyer

On a good day, it achieves something between a really thorough teeth cleaning—as a writer once described it to me—and a whiz-bang magic act.

“Copy editors,” she intoned, and I can still hear every crisp consonant and orotund vowel, all these years later, “are like priests, safeguarding their faith.” Now, that’s a benediction.*2

“STET”—that’s Latin, I learned, for “let it stand,” a.k.a. “keep your hands to yourself”—would

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.

We also, many of us, text and tweet, and these activities have spawned their own rules, all of which lie outside the realm of this book.

Go a week without writing very rather really quite in fact

It has, to my great dismay, no enforceable laws, much less someone to enforce the laws it doesn’t have.*1

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

One of the best ways to determine whether your prose is well-constructed is to read it aloud. A sentence that can’t be readily voiced is a sentence that likely needs to be rewritten.

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.

No, do begin a sentence with “And” or “But,” if it strikes your fancy to do so. Great writers do it all the time.

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 of using any of them palls quickly. 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.

Chandler sent this note to the editor of The Atlantic Monthly in response to the copyediting of an article he’d written: By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that 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.

but there’s not a goshdarn thing wrong with “don’t,” “can’t,” “wouldn’t,” and all the rest of them that people naturally use, and without them many a piece of writing would turn out stilted and wooden. The likes of “I’d’ve” and “should’ve” are perhaps a bit too loosey-goosey outside casual prose, but generally speaking: Contractions are why God invented the apostrophe, so make good use of both.

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.

But many a sentence can be improved by putting its true protagonist at the beginning, so that’s something to be considered.*7

You may not be Charles Dickens, but a well-wielded sentence fragment (or, as here, a passel of them) can be a delightful thing. 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.

That’s the whole thing: If 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.

After failed attempts to read Oliver Twist and Great Expectations—doubtless failed because it was easier, and quicker, to watch the movies—I picked up Bleak House, about which I knew nothing, and was immediately and utterly enthralled, starting with Dickens’s dinosaur shout-out. It always struck me as weirdly out of place in this most Victorian of novels, but as a Dickens specialist eventually pointed out to me, Dickens always had his eye on what the public found fascinating at that precise second and, showman that he was, made good use of it. Which is why one should not be surprised—though almost everyone I know who’s read Bleak House remarks on their utter WTF delight when they first got to it—at the eventual appearance in the novel of an instance of—spoiler alert—spontaneous human combustion. I mean, wow.

IF WORDS ARE THE FLESH, MUSCLE, AND BONE OF PROSE, punctuation is the breath. In support of the words you’ve carefully selected, punctuation is your best means of conveying to the reader how you mean your writing to be read, how you mean for it to sound. A comma sounds different than a semicolon; parentheses make a different noise than dashes.

Q. Two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence, right? A. Wrong. I know that back when you were in seventh-grade typing class and pecking away at your Smith Corona Coronet Automatic 12, Mrs. Tegnell taught you to type a double space after a sentence-ending period, but you are no longer in the seventh grade, you are no longer typing on a typewriter, and Mrs. Tegnell is no longer looking over your shoulder. Either break yourself of the habit or, once you’ve finished writing whatever it is you’re writing, do a global search-and-exterminate for double spaces, which will dispose of not only end-of-sentence offenders but those that have crept into your text between words as you cut, copied, pasted, and otherwise revised. If you don’t, I will.*2

They also shouldn’t appear anywhere else but on envelopes and packages. In bibliographies and notes sections, and anywhere else you may need to abbreviate a state’s name, please stick to the old-fashioned and more attractive Mass., N.Y., Calif., and so on. Or just be a grown-up and write the whole thing out.

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.

So long as the commaless rendition is clear and understandable, you’re on safe ground. The longer the introductory bit, the more likely you are to want/need a comma:

But do avoid crashing proper nouns, as in In June Truman’s secretary of state flew to Moscow.

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

The result of a comma splice is known as—and you may well recall this term from middle school English class—a run-on sentence.

A long sentence is a long sentence, it’s only a run-on sentence when it’s not punctuated in the standard fashion.

The vocative comma—or the comma of direct address—is the comma separating a bit of speech from the name (or title or other identifier) of the person (or sometimes the thing) being addressed.

“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, Abraham Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert, was born on August 1, 1843.

At the other end of the spectrum, then, be careful not to set an “only” comma where there is no only-ness, as in, say: The Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, Edith Wharton, was born in New York City. Because Mrs. Wharton is merely one of many winners of the Pulitzer, there should be no “only” comma.

Best Illustration of the Necessity of the “Only” Comma I’ve Ever Managed to Rustle Up Elizabeth Taylor’s second marriage, to Michael Wilding Elizabeth Taylor’s second marriage to Richard Burton

What goes up must come down, and that which commences with a comma, if it is an interruption, must also end with one,

Colons are not merely introductory but presentational. They say: Here comes something! Think of colons as little trumpet blasts, attention-getting and ear-catching. Also loud. So don’t use so many of them that you give your reader a headache.

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.

Post-colon lists of things or fragmentary phrases should begin with a lowercase letter: items on a grocery list, the contents of one’s hope chest, moral precepts, etc.

DO NOT EVER ATTEMPT TO USE AN APOSTROPHE TO PLURALIZE A WORD. “NOT EVER” AS IN “NEVER.”

In any event, don’t use them. Not for bananas, potatoes, bagels, princesses, Trumans, Adamses, Obamas, or whatever else you’ve got more than one of.

The pluralization of abbreviations, too, requires no apostrophes. More than one CD = CDs. More than one ID = IDs. More than one ATM = ATMs. Etc.

To say nothing of dos and don’ts, yeses and nos, etc.*19

There’s no such word as “their’s.” Or “your’s.”

I’d even urge you to set aside the Traditional Exceptions for Antiquity and/or Being the Son of God and go with: Socrates’s Aeschylus’s Xerxes’s Jesus’s

The pluralization of s-ending proper nouns seems to trip up a lot of people, but John and Abigail are the Adamses, as are John Quincy and Louisa, as are Rutherford B. and Lucy the Hayeses, and that seems to be that for s-ending presidents, but you get the point. People who are perfectly content to keep up with the Joneses—and I’ll wager the Joneses are good and tired of receiving Christmas cards addressed to “the Jones’s”—sometimes balk at the sight of the Adamses, the Hayeses, the Reynoldses, the Dickenses, and the rest, but balk all you like, that’s how the game is played.*26 If it’s bothersome to you, you may address your Christmas card to, say, “the Adams family.” As to the possessives, then, a relative piece of cake: the Trumans’ singing daughter the Adamses’ celebrated correspondence the Dickenses’ trainwreck of a marriage

I love semicolons like I love pizza; fried pork dumplings; Venice, Italy; and the operas of Puccini. Why does the sentence above include semicolons? Because the most basic use of semicolons is to divide the items in a list any of whose individual elements mandate a comma—in this case, Venice, Italy.

But semicolons are unavoidable when you must write the likes of: Lucy’s favorite novels are Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; Farewell, My Lovely; and One Time, One Place. Because: Lucy’s favorite novels are Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, Farewell, My Lovely, and One Time, One Place. Well, how many novels is that, anyway? Three? Five?

I counter this with a lovely remark by author Lewis Thomas from The Medusa and the Snail: The things I like best in T. S. Eliot’s poetry, especially in the Four Quartets, are the semicolons. You cannot hear them, but they are there, laying out the connections between the images and the ideas. Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.

A midsentence parenthetical aside (like this one) begins with a lowercase letter and concludes (unless it’s a question or even an exclamation!) without terminal punctuation.

When a fragmentary parenthetical aside comes at the very end of a sentence, make sure that the period stays outside the aside (as here).