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

by Benjamin Dreyer

MARTHA. So? He’s a biologist. Good for him. Biology’s even better. It’s less…abstruse. GEORGE. Abstract. MARTHA. ABSTRUSE! In the sense of recondite. (Sticks her tongue out at GEORGE) Don’t you tell me words. —Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

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. (If you want to puzzle your reader, that’s your own business.)

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. Over and out.

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.

Flannery O’Connor, or Zora Neale Hurston, or William Faulkner,

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.

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.