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

by Benjamin Dreyer

First: If you find yourself making a parenthetical comment within a parenthetical comment, the enclosed parenthetical comment is set within brackets. But it’s extraordinarily unattractive on the page (I try to find a way around it [I mean, truly, do you like the way this looks?], at least whenever I can), so avoid it.

Second: Any time you find yourself interpolating a bit of your own text into quoted material (a helpfully added clarifying first name, for instance, when the original text contained only a surname) or in any other way altering a quotation, you must—and I mean must—enclose your interpolation in brackets.*32

Let’s take a moment to talk about [sic]. 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. As, for instance and strictly speaking, you might do here, in quoting this piece of text I 100 percent made up out of thin air and didn’t find on, say, Twitter: Their [sic] was no Collusion [sic] and there was no Obstruction [sic].

Use roman (straight up and down, that is, like the font this phrase is printed in) type encased in quotation marks for the titles of songs, poems, short stories, and episodes of TV series.*33 Whereas the titles of music albums,*34 volumes of poetry, full-length works of fiction and nonfiction, and TV series themselves are styled in aslant italics. “Court and Spark” Court and Spark “Song of Myself” Leaves of Grass “The Lottery” The Lottery and Other Stories “Chuckles Bites the Dust” The Mary Tyler Moore Show (also known as, simply, Mary Tyler Moore) It’s a fairly simple system, then: little things in roman and quotes, bigger things in italics.*35

An exclamation point or question mark at the end of a sentence ending with a bit of quoted matter goes outside rather than inside the quotation marks if the exclamation point or question mark belongs to the larger sentence rather than to the quoted bit,

If you’re invested in getting your hyphens correctly sorted out in compound adjectives, verbs, and nouns, and you like being told what to do, just pick up your dictionary and look ’em up. Those listings are correct.

An en dash is used to hold words together instead of your standard hyphen, which usually does the trick just fine, when one is connecting a multiword proper noun to another multiword proper noun or to pretty much anything else. What the heck does that mean? It means this: a Meryl Streep–Robert De Niro comedy a New York–to–Chicago flight a World War II–era plane a Pulitzer Prize–winning play Basically, that which you’re connecting needs a smidgen more connecting than can be accomplished with a hyphen.

En dashes are also used for page references (pp. 3–21) sporting game scores (the Yankees clobbered the Mets, 14–2)*49 court decisions (the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling by a 7–2 vote)

Go light on the exclamation points. When overused, they’re bossy, hectoring, and, ultimately, wearying. Some writers recommend that you should use no more than a dozen exclamation points per book; others insist that you should use no more than a dozen exclamation points in a lifetime.

No one over the age of ten who is not actively engaged in the writing of a comic book should end any sentence with a double exclamation point or double question mark.

We won’t discuss the use of ?! or !? because you’d never do that.*50

Some older folks I’ve encountered are furiously insistent about the eternal propriety of sentence-dividing double spaces. Likely they also advocate for the retention of the long s, and I wish them much ſucceſs. If you’re a younger person who’s only ever typed on a computer keyboard, odds are good you were not taught the double-space thing, so feel free to slide past this subject altogether with the head-shaking insouciance of your generation.

An acronym is an abbreviation pronounced as a word—NASA or UNESCO, for instance. The Brits tend to style these sorts of things as Nasa and Unesco and, worst of the worst, Aids, which makes my teeth itch. Once an acronym turns into a common word—likely you’ve forgotten that “radar” is short for “RAdio Detecting And Ranging” (how could you not forget that?) and that “laser” stands for “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation” (ditto)—one drops the capital letters altogether, as I’ve just done. An initialism is an abbreviation pronounced letter by letter—as, say, FBI or CIA.

The Times is a U.K. newspaper whose name is not, never has been, and likely never will be The London Times. The New York Times is an American newspaper that you may refer to, familiarly, as “the Times,” no matter that it persists in referring to itself, grandly and pushily, as The Times.

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.

The NSA may be reading your emails and texts, but I’m not. If you prefer “Hi John” to “Hi, John,” you go right ahead.

The fact that the plural of “series” is “series” is almost as bothersome as the fact that “read” is the past tense of “read,” but “serieses” is, aside from incorrect, ridiculous-looking.

Six consecutive words set in italics certainly aren’t going to bother anyone, but I caution you against setting anything longer than a single sentence that way. For one thing, italics weary the eye; for another, multiple paragraphs of text set in italics suggest a dream sequence, and readers are always keen to skip dream sequences.

At Random House, I was happy to help push “website” along—if you’re apt to encounter a word dozens of times a day, you’ll tend to want to make that word as simple as possible—though I still feel a pang of remorse over my acquiescence to “email”—doesn’t “e-mail” look better and, more important, look like what it sounds like? But “email” was happening whether I liked it or not, and, as in so many things, one can be either on the bus or under the bus.

On a Mac, you can create an en dash by typing option-hyphen. On an iPhone, if you lean gently on the hyphen key, an en dash will present itself, as well as an em dash and a bullet. On a PC, I believe one types command–3–do the hokey pokey, or some such.

Numerals are generally avoided in dialogue.

It’s considered bad form to begin a sentence with a numeral or numerals.

I’ll note that, at least in my experience, writers still overwhelmingly favor B.C. and A.D., and that B.C.E. and C.E. remain about as popular, at least in the United States, as the metric system.

So are biblical references to chapter and verse (Exodus 3:12, for instance).

In Microsoft Word you can create small caps by either typing the letters in question in lowercase, highlighting them, then hitting Command+Shift+K or, if that’s not a thing you can readily remember, typing the letters in question in lowercase, highlighting them, then heading up to the top of your screen and fiddling your way through Format and Font.

Be careful not to write “the years from 1960–1969.” If you’ve got a “from,” you need a “to.”

In written English they’re occasionally omitted, and the dictionary will often give you permission to skip them, but sojourning in a chateau can’t be nearly as much fun as sojourning in a château, and if you send me your resume rather than your résumé, I’m probably not going to hire you.*3

I’m as guilty as the next chap of appropriating British*6 vocabulary as it amuses me, but a little of that goes a long way, and even I get shirty when it’s overdone. Americans do not live in flats; they live in apartments. When a Brit wears a jumper, it’s a sweater; when an American wears a jumper, it’s one of those invariably unflattering sleeveless smock things (which the Brits might call a pinafore dress). We ride in elevators; they ride in lifts. They pump petrol; we pump gasoline. Our chips come in a bag; their chips are french fries, as in “fish and,” and what we call chips they call crisps. We eat zucchini, eggplant, and arugula; they eat courgettes, aubergines, and rocket (and “rocket,” you have to admit, is a spectacular term for a salad green). Brits laugh at us for doing math, because they do maths. And on and endlessly on.*7

Of course, some words do drift over here and take legitimate root. I recall first encountering the word “twee” back in the 1980s and being unable to find it in my dictionary; now one can’t seem to get away from it here, especially in reference to a studiously adorable sort of pop music invariably including ukuleles. And we’ve found many good uses for “queue,” though patriotic Americans still don’t queue up; they get in line.

Avoid the Brit “ou,” as in “neighbour,” “colour,” “harbour,” and “labour,” in favor of the streamlined American “neighbor,” “color,” “harbor,” and “labor.”*8 (Proper nouns are always to be kept nation-authentic, though. One should no more refer to the U.K. Labour Party as the “Labor Party” than a Brit should refer to the bombing of “Pearl Harbour.”)

(I have an exceptionally large bone to pick with The New York Times, which persists in imposing its preference for “theater” on edifices and companies not named thus, here and abroad. The paper’s constant references to London’s “National Theater” are, on so many levels, galling. That’s not its name.)

Some Americans dig their heels in re “theatre,” often insisting that plays are performed in theatres but movies are shown in theaters (no, we don’t call them cinemas over here), or that a building is a theater but the theatrical art is the theatre. And to them I say: You know you’re doing it because you think that the “-re” spelling is fancier, and I’d like you to stop.

Over there, things are learnt and burnt and spoilt and smelt. Over here, they’re learned and burned (unless the next word is “sienna”) and spoiled and smelled.*9

Our zero is their nought.

Please leave “whilst” and “amidst” and especially “amongst” to our cousins; “while” and “amid” and “...

And on and on: The Brits analyse; we analyze. We inquire; they enquire. They prise; we pry (or, in a pinch, prize). They plough, we plow. They favor “practise” as a verb and “practice” as a noun; we use “practice” for both. They have licences; we have licenses. (Proper-noun respect, to be sure, to the James Bond film Licence to Kill.) They vary between “judgement” and “judgment”; we use the latter….

If you want readers to skip over a great big swath of your writing, set it in italics, which, over the course of multiple paragraphs, tend to convey Lengthy Interior Monologue or Something Else I Probably Don’t Want to Read.

Scottish and Welsh people will tolerate being referred to as British, but do not ever mistake them for Englishpeople. Never, if you know what’s good for you, refer to an Irishperson as British. Irishpeople are Irish.

Much transatlantic hilarity ensues over confusion between U.K. and U.S. uses of, among other words, “pissed,” “fanny,” and “fag,” to say nothing of “pants,” but I think we’ve had enough transatlantic hilarity for the moment.

Buy me a cocktail or two and I’ll regale you at length with my admittedly crackpot notion that gray and grey are, push comes to shove, two different colors, the former having a glossy, almost silvery sheen to it, the latter being heavier, duller, and sodden.

one of those who [or] one of the things that.”

Basic “whom” use shouldn’t pose too many challenges. If you can remember to think of “who” as the cousin of “I,” “he,” “she,” and “they” (the thing doing the thing, a.k.a. a subject) and to think of “whom” as the cousin of “me,” “him,” “her,” and “them” (the thing being done to, a.k.a. an object), you’re most of the way there.

Essentially, a sentence’s introductory bit and its main bit need to fuse correctly. Or, as I like to think of it, they need to talk to each other. If a sentence begins “Flipping restlessly through the channels,” then the sentence’s subject—more than likely, its very next word—has to tell us who’s holding the remote. It might be “I,” it might be “he,” it might be “Cecilia,” but it’s certainly not “John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” Strolling through the park, the weather was beautiful. Nope. The weather was beautiful as we strolled through the park. Yup.

Five-digit zip codes didn’t turn up till the 1960s (and the additional four digits didn’t arrive till the 1980s); neither did the two-letter periodless state abbreviations we’re all now used to. An envelope in the 1950s would not have been addressed to, say: Boston, MA 02128 It would have been, using the postal zone system devised in the 1940s, addressed to: Boston 28, Mass. If your epistolary novel spanning decades requires this sort of stuff, you’d do well to get this sort of stuff right.*10

Many writers rely more heavily on pronouns than I’d suggest is useful. For me this sort of thing comes under the heading Remember that Writing Is Not Speaking. When we talk, we can usually make ourselves understood even amid a flood of vague “he”s and “she”s. On the page, too many pronouns are apt to be confounding. 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.

Consider jotting down on a pad your favorite five-dollar words as you use them to ensure that none of them appear more than once per manuscript.

Also be wary of inadvertent rhymes, of the “Rob commuted to his job” or “make sure that tonight is all right” sort. By “be wary,” I mean: Don’t do them.

This may be a particular peeve of mine and no one else’s, but I note it, because it’s my book: Name-dropping, for no better reason than to show off, underappreciated novels, obscure foreign films, or cherished indie bands by having one’s characters irrelevantly reading or watching or listening to them is massively sore-thumbish. A novel is not a blog post about Your Favorite Things.*17 If you must do this sort of thing—and, seriously, must you?—contextualize heavily.

Dialogue can be said, shouted, sputtered, barked, shrieked, or whispered—it can even be murmured—but it can’t be smiled or shrugged.

“Try to preserve an author’s style if he is an author and has a style.”