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

by Benjamin Dreyer

A sentence that can’t be readily voiced is a sentence that likely needs to be rewritten.

Contractions Aren’t Allowed in Formal Writing. This may be a fine rule to observe if you want to sound as if you learned English on your native Mars,

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.

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.

Some sentences don’t need to be repunctuated; they need to be rewritten.*7

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 novels of a particular author, etc.

One too many coy asides and you, in the person of your writing, will seem like a dandy in a Restoration comedy stepping down to the footlights and curling his hand around his mouth to confidentially address the audience.

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].

One also sets off dialogue with quotation marks, though some writers (E. L. Doctorow, William Gaddis, and Cormac McCarthy come immediately to mind) like to do without, to which I simply say: To pull that off, you have to be awfully good at differentiating between narration and dialogue.

Such quotation marks do not, strictly speaking, come under the heading of scare quotes, which are quotation marks used to convey that the writer finds a term too slangish to sit on its own (I have old books in which young people listen not to jazz but to “jazz”; it makes me chortle every time) and/or is sneering at it. Avoid scare quotes. They’ll make you look snotty today and, twenty years on, snotty and comically obsolete.*39

(Staring at words is always a bad idea. Stare at the word “the” for more than ten seconds and reality begins to recede.)

Likely you don’t need much advice from me on how to use em dashes, because you all seem to use an awful lot of them.

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.

Neither will we discuss the interrobang, because we’re all civilized adults here.

Numerals are generally avoided in dialogue.

Our cousins across the ocean had their chance running the world and the language. At a certain point—something about a Stamp Act and some toppled tea bags, as I recall—we decided to go our own way and set about building not only our own political system but, with a major assist from the determined Noah Webster, our own language.

When you’ve come up with that piquantly on-the-nose, distinctive, wow-that’s-perfect adjective, you may—as I’ve noticed—be so pleased with it that you unwittingly summon it up again right away. If an idea is, say, benighted on p. 27, some other idea oughtn’t to be benighted on p. 31.*13 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.

A brief, scarcely exhaustive list of other actions that wise writers might do well to put on permanent hiatus: the angry flaring of nostrils the thoughtful pursing of lips the quizzical cocking of the head the letting out of the breath you didn’t even know you were holding the extended mirror stare, especially as a warm-up for a memory whose recollection is apt to go on for ten pages

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.

Fond as I am of semicolons, they’re ungainly in dialogue. Avoid them.

Except for Breakfast

No boldface, please, not ever.

Do not attempt, here in the twenty-first century, to convey the utterance of a character who may be speaking other than what, for the sake of convenience, I’ll call standard English with the use of tortured phonetic spellings, the relentless replacement of terminal g’s with apostrophes, or any of the other tricks that might have worked for Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, or William Faulkner but are, I assure you, not going to work for you. At best you’ll come off as classist and condescending; at worst, in some cases, you’ll tip over into racism.

I’ve mentioned this before, and it applies to all writing, but I think it applies especially to fiction, whether you’re writing it or copyediting it: Reading fiction aloud highlights strengths and exposes weaknesses. I heartily recommend it.

Chapter swaps

I’VE NEVER MET A WRITER OR OTHER WORD PERSON who didn’t possess a pocketful of language peeves and crotchets—words or uses of words that drive a normally reasonable person into unreasonable fits of pique, if not paroxysms of rage—and I doubt I’d trust anyone anyway who denied having a few of these bugaboos stashed away somewhere.

There are those who insist on using “enormity” only in cases of monstrous evil (“the enormity of her crimes”), which is more or less how the word arrived in the English language, and would have you use “enormousness” (or “largeness” or “immensity” or “abundance” or some such) in descriptions of size.

Enormity of our affair

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.”

IRONY Funniness is not irony. Coincidence is not irony. Weirdness is not irony. Rain on your wedding day is not irony. Irony is irony. I once copyedited a work in which the author, if he used the phrase “deliciously ironic” once, used it a dozen times. The problem was, nothing he ever said was either delicious or ironic. Which, as a colleague pointed out, was deliciously ironic.

LEARNINGS Have you no sense of decency? At long last, have you no sense of decency? They’re lessons.

ONBOARD The use of “onboard” as a verb in place of “familiarize” or “integrate” is grotesque. It’s bad enough when it’s applied to policies; applied to new employees in place of the perfectly lovely word “orient,” it’s worse. And it feels like a terribly short walk from onboarding a new employee to waterboarding one.

’ROUND If she’s approachin’ by way of circumnavigatin’ a mountain, she’s comin’ round it, and one can do nicely without a preceding apostrophe. I’m talking to you, people who like to write “ ’til” or, worse, “ ’till.”

UTILIZE You can haul out “utilize” when you’re speaking of making particularly good use of something, as in utilizing facts and figures to project a company’s future earnings. Otherwise all you really need is “use.”

DISASSOCIATE/DISSOCIATE They mean the same thing—sever—and they showed up in English around the same time. For reasons I can’t discern, “disassociate” gets a lot of rocks thrown at it; I can’t say that it bothers me. If you’re aware of the psychological meaning of dissociation—a separation from reality that occurs in crisis—you may come to think of “disassociation” as better suited to more everyday severances, as, say, disassociating oneself from an offensive statement made by one’s racist uncle at Thanksgiving dinner.

HANGED/HUNG Criminals are hanged. Paintings are hung. Some. Also men. Some.

Speakers imply; listeners infer.

MARITAL/MARTIAL The former refers to marriage, the latter to the military. Unless your marriage is militaristic, in which case word choice probably isn’t your biggest problem.

Also, what a plumber does for a living is plumb. A plummy speaking voice is too rich, too proper, too self-conscious—that is to say, too-too.

And that sense of anticipatory salivation is why “toothsome” is also applied to people who are sexually appealing, I imagine.

E. E. CUMMINGS Edward Estlin Cummings, in full. Poet. His name is not “e. e. cummings.”*5

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

I once—and, happily, to date, only once—encountered the term “prose novel,” which is as brain-clonking a redundancy as “fiction novel” but which I eventually realized was meant as a retronym:*1 In a world full of graphic novels, the user of the term had apparently decided, one must identify a work of fiction containing a hundred thousand words, give or take, but lacking pictures as a “prose novel.” Decency forbids. 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.

“Undergraduate” is an excellent noun. No need to use it as an adjective to modify itself.

Copyediting FAQ Q. What’s the most redundant redundancy you’ve ever encountered? A. I recall it as if it were yesterday: “He implied without quite saying.” I was so filled with delight on encountering that, I scarcely had the heart to cross out “without quite saying” and to note in the margin, politely and succinctly, “BY DEF.” But I did it anyway.

9. Of two brothers, one fifteen and one seventeen, the fifteen-year-old is the younger, not the youngest, and the seventeen-year-old is the older (or elder, if you like), not the oldest (or eldest). It takes three to make an “-est.” Except, English being English, in the phrase “best foot forward.”

You don’t tow the line. You toe it.

I once, in a U.K. manuscript, encountered this bit of dialogue: “Oh, well, tomato, to-may-to.” I stared at it for a full thirty seconds before I understood what I was looking at.

There are any number of synonyms, some nicer than others, for “fat”—including “bovine,” “stout,” and (one of my favorites, since an art history professor applied it to a Renoir nude) “fubsy”—and