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

by Benjamin Dreyer

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

There was that one writer who, in overriding a copy editor’s attempt to repair one of his (I must point out for the historical record) godawful sentences, sniffily noted “It’s called style” in the margin. And the one who, in response to a perfectly demure piece of editorial advice, scrawled in what was either red crayon or blood, “WRITE YOUR OWN FUCKING BOOK.”

HERE’S YOUR FIRST CHALLENGE: Go a week without writing very rather really quite in fact And you can toss in—or, that is, toss out—“just” (not in the sense of “righteous” but in the sense of “merely”) and “so” (in the “extremely” sense, though as conjunctions go it’s pretty disposable too). Oh yes: “pretty.” As in “pretty tedious.” Or “pretty pedantic.” Go ahead and kill that particular darling. And “of course.” That’s right out. And “surely.” And “that said.” And “actually”? Feel free to go the rest of your life without another “actually.”*1 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.

Quite a lot of what I do as a copy editor is to help writers avoid being carped at, fairly or—and this is the part that hurts—unfairly, by People Who Think They Know Better and Write Aggrieved Emails to Publishing Houses. Thus I tend to be a bit conservative about flouting rules that may be a bit dubious in their origin but, observed, ain’t hurting nobody. And though the nonrules below are particularly arrant nonsense, I warn you that, in breaking them, you’ll have a certain percentage of the reading and online-commenting populace up your fundament to tell you you’re subliterate. Go ahead and break them anyway. It’s fun, and I’ll back you up.

Writers who are not so adept at linking their sentences habitually toss in a “But” or a “However” to create the illusion that a second thought contradicts a first thought when it doesn’t do any such thing. It doesn’t work, and I’m on to you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Those two-letter state abbreviations that the USPS—which I’m still tempted to style U.S.P.S. but won’t—likes to see on envelopes (MA, NY, CA, and the like) do not take periods. 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.

The “bananas, and” comma. That’s the series comma. 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.

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.

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

“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.

If you’re about to offer a piece of information that’s crucial to your sentence, offer it up without a comma and with a “that”: Please fetch me the Bible that’s on the table. Which is to say: Fetch me the Bible that is on the table rather than the Bible that’s under the couch or the Bible that’s poised picturesquely on the window seat. If you’re offering a piece of information that’s perhaps interesting amplification but might well be deleted without harm, offer it up with a comma and a “which”: Please fetch me the Bible, which is on the table. One Bible and one Bible only.

In July 2017 one of our nation’s preëminent if perhaps somewhat self-delightedly parochial magazines foisted upon the world this headline: DONALD TRUMP, JR.,’S LOVE FOR RUSSIAN DIRT The writer Michael Colton, in an aghast tweet, identified this particular method of rendering a possessive “period-comma-apostrophe bullshit,” which may not be the precise technical term for it but which does just fine anyway.

Brackets—or square brackets, as they’re called by people who call parentheses “round brackets”—serve a limited but crucial purpose. 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

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.

One does not, as in the rugelach example cited above, use quotation marks for emphasis. That is why God invented italics.

Oh, but here’s my favorite: The preferred U.K. spelling of the color that describes ashes and the eyes of the goddess Athena is “grey.” The preferred American spelling is “gray,” but try telling that to the writers who will go ballistic if, in copyediting, you attempt to impose that spelling. In all my years of correcting other people’s spelling, I don’t think I’ve ever come up against more pushback than on this point. My long-held theory—make of it what you will—is that the spelling “grey” imprints itself on some people who encounter it in beloved classic children’s books, and they form an emotional attachment to it. Or, I don’t know, they’re just stubborn.*11

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.

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.

Yet for what it’s worth, I note that in one of my prize possessions, a tattered copy of Vogue’s Book of Etiquette, copyright 1923, the pronoun of choice for a nonspecific infant or child is “it.”

Go light on exclamation points in dialogue. No, even lighter than that. Are you down to none yet? Good.

ONE MORNING IN DECEMBER 2016 the then president-elect of the United States took to Twitter, as was his incessant wont, and accused the Chinese, who’d just, in an act of penny-ante provocation, shanghaied a U.S. drone, of an “unpresidented act.” In a flash I was reminded of the importance of knowing how to spell.

RESTAURATEUR It’s not “restauranteur,” and the floor is not open to debate.

The important thing to remember about peeves and crotchets is that your own peeves and crotchets reflect sensible preferences based on a refined appreciation of the music and meaning of the English language, and that everyone else’s are the products of diseased minds.

Verb-to-noun transformations—“nominalization” is the formal term for the process—can grate as well as amuse,

Begging the question, as the term is traditionally understood, is a kind of logical fallacy—the original Latin is petitio principii, and no, I don’t know these things off the top of my head; I look them up like any normal human being—in which one argues for the legitimacy of a conclusion by citing as evidence the very thing one is trying to prove in the first place. Circular reasoning, that is.

CLICHÉ It’s a perfectly lovely noun. As an adjective, it rankles. You can afford the extra letter in “clichéd.” Use it.

If you use the word “factoid” to refer to a bite-size nugget of authentic information of the sort you’ll find in a listicle,*5 you’ll sadden those of us who hold to the word’s original meaning: According to Norman Mailer, who should certainly know as he was the one who invented the word in the first place, factoids are “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.” That the Great Wall of China is visible from the Moon (or even from your plain-vanilla astronaut orbit) is a factoid, as are the existence of George Washington’s wooden teeth, the nationwide panic caused by Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” broadcast, and the execution by burning at the stake of Salem’s condemned witches.*6

Perhaps you’ve turned this distinction into a fetish. The strict—and, really, not all that hard to remember—differentiation is that “fewer than” is applied to countable objects (fewer bottles of beer on the wall) and “less than” to what we call exclusively singular nouns (less happiness, less quality) and mass nouns (fewer chips, less guacamole).

If you decline to write “firstly,” “secondly,” and “thirdly” in favor of “first,” “second,” and “third,” not only are you saving letters but you can tell all your friends about this amazing thing called a flat adverb—an adverb that matches in form its sibling adjective, notably doesn’t end in -ly, and is 100 percent correct, which is why we’re allowed to say “Sleep tight,” “Drive safe,” and “Take it easy.” Though not in that order.

“Penultimate” is not a fancyism for “ultimate.” It does not mean “like totally ultimate, bro.” It means “the thing before the last thing.”

“Everyday” is an adjective (“an everyday occurrence”), “every day” an adverb (“I go to work every day”). “Everyday” is increasingly often being used as an adverb; this is highly bothersome, and please don’t you dare speed up the trend.

Birds of prey and missiles home in on their targets. To hone is to sharpen. The phrase “hone in on” is one of those so-many-people-use-it-that-it-has-its-own-dictionary-entry-and-can-scarcely-anymore-be-called-an-error things, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

One notes that “lay” is a transitive verb, which means that it demands an object. A transitive verb doesn’t merely do; it must do to something. One does not merely lay; one lays a thing.*21 I lay my hands on a long-sought volume of poetry. I lay blame on a convenient stooge. I lay (if I am a hen) an egg.*22 What does this mean to you? Well, for a start: If you’re hesitating between “lie” and “lay” and (a) your sentence has a thing to act upon and (b) you can replace the verb you’re in a quandary about with a less confusingly transitive verb like “place,” you need a “lay.” “Lie,” on the other hand, is an intransitive verb. I lie, period. Works for both recumbence and fibbing. No object needed. “Lie” can handle an adverb (I lie down, I lie badly) or a place on which to do it (I lie on the couch); it just doesn’t need a thing, a what, attached to it. Unfortunately, both verbs can and must be conjugated, and this is where the trouble kicks in. Let’s run through them, tensely. to lay present lay I lay the bowl on the table. present participle laying I am laying the bowl on the table. past laid Earlier, I laid the bowl on the table. past participle laid I have laid the bowl on the table. to lie (in the sense of to recline)*23 present lie I lie down. present participle lying Look at me: I am lying down. past lay Yesterday, I lay down. past participle lain Look at me: I have lain down. That the past participle of “lie” is “lain,” which never looks right to anyone, is bad enough. T...

To militate against is to prevent or to counteraffect, as the presence of heavily armed soldiers will militate against public unrest. To mitigate is to alleviate, as the presence of the Red Cross will mitigate the suffering of hurricane victims. No matter how many times you see “mitigate against,” which is all the time, it is never correct.

In America we do the hokey pokey (and we turn ourselves around). In England they do the hokey cokey (and they turn themselves around).

Use “stanch” when you mean to stop the flow of something, as blood from a wound, or to hold something in check, as to stanch the rising violence in a war-torn country. And use “staunch” to describe someone who is indomitable, steadfast, loyal, and strong.

W.E.B. DU BOIS Writer and civil rights activist. His surname is correctly rendered “Du Bois” and not (as for Tennessee Williams’s Blanche) “DuBois.” And it’s pronounced not “doo-BWAH” (which would be correct for Blanche) but “doo-BOYZ.”

That said, “nonfiction novel” is not the oxymoron it might at first seem. The term refers to the genre pioneered—though not, as is occasionally averred, invented—by Truman Capote with In Cold Blood, that of the work of nonfiction written novelistically.

One need no more refer to a novel as a “prose novel” than one need refer to a concoction of a lot of gin and as little vermouth as is humanly possible as a “gin martini.” Martinis, by definition, are made with gin. The burden is on misguided people who make them with vodka to append those two extra syllables.

frontispiece illustration A frontispiece is an illustration immediately preceding, and generally facing, a book’s title page.

There is a world of difference between turning in to a driveway, which is a natural thing to do with one’s car, and turning into a driveway, which is a Merlyn trick.

If you love something passionately and vigorously, you love it no end. To love something “to no end,” as one often sees it rendered, would be to love it pointlessly. If that’s what you mean, then OK.

You want to be especially careful, though, not to turn the tables and refer to a woman as “a female.” “Female” as a noun is rarely meant as a compliment, and it’s unlikely to be taken as one.

The past tense of the verb “gaslight”—as in that which Charles Boyer does to Ingrid Bergman in the eponymous 1944 MGM thriller by undermining her belief in reality to the point she believes she’s going mad—is “gaslighted.”

Something that is well established down to the marrow is not “deep-seeded,” which may sound as if it makes sense but, I’m assured by people who know how plants work, doesn’t. It is, rather, “deep-seated.”