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

by Benjamin Dreyer

The genius writer who somehow can’t spell is a mythical beast, but everyone mistypes things.) And to remind you of what you already likely know, spellcheck and autocorrect are marvelous accomplices—I never type without one or the other turned on—but they won’t always get you to the word you meant to use.

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.

faffing

It’s like endlessly working on one of those spot-the-difference picture puzzles in an especially satanic issue of Highlights for Children.

tacitly

You’re attempting to burrow into the brains of your writers and do for, to, and with their prose what they themselves might have done for, to, and with it had they not already looked at each damn sentence 657 times.

Go a week without writing very rather really quite in fact

And if you feel that what’s left is somehow missing something, figure out a better, stronger, more effective way to make your point.

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.)

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.

A split infinitive, as we generally understand the term, is a “to [verb]” construction with an adverb stuck in the middle of it. In the Star Trek example, then, an unsplit infinitive version would be “Boldly to go where no man has gone before” or “To go boldly where no man has gone before.” If either of those sounds better to you, be my guest. To me they sound as if they were translated from the Vulcan.

preposition (as, at, by, for, from, of, etc.

But to tie a sentence into a strangling knot to avoid a prepositional conclusion is unhelpful and unnatural, and it’s something no good writer should attempt and no eager reader should have to contend with.

Southern Gal, amiably, to Frosty Matron: So where y’all from? Frosty Matron, no doubt giving Southern Gal a once-over through a lorgnette: I’m from a place where people don’t end their sentences with prepositions. Southern Gal, sweetly, after a moment’s consideration: OK. So where y’all from, bitch?

Contractions are why God invented the apostrophe, so make good use of both.

All this said, there’s nothing wrong with sentences constructed in the passive voice—you’re simply choosing where you want to put the sentence’s emphasis—and I see nothing objectionable in, say,

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.

And that’s often the problem, isn’t it? In writing and in so many things: that we accept things we’re taught without thinking about them at all.

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.

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.

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.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

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

That said, you will find—if you’ve a penchant for noticing these things, professionally or otherwise—that compounds have a tendency, over time, to spit out unnecessary hyphens and close themselves up. Over the course of my career I’ve seen “light bulb” evolve into “light-bulb” and then into “lightbulb,” “baby-sit” give way to “babysit,” and—a big one—“Web site” turn into “Web-site,” then, happily, “website.”

Multiply this times hundreds of compounds, and watch the language whoosh into the future before your very eyes. Then watch the dictionary keep up with you, because that’s how it works. As a lexicographer friend once confided over sushi, the dictionary takes its cues from use: If writers don’t change things, the dictionary doesn’t change things.

Because, we’re told, the possibility of misreading is slim to nil, so a hyphen is unnecessary. Or, if you prefer a simpler explanation: Because.

Close it up. Hyphenated vulgarities are comically dainty.

En dashes are the guild secret of copyediting, and most normal people neither use them nor much know what they are nor even know how to type them.

If—and I’d restrict this bit of advice for more casual prose or the rendering of dialogue—a sentence is constructed like a question but isn’t intended to be one, you might consider concluding it with a period rather than a question mark. “That’s a good idea, don’t you think?” means something quite different from “That’s a horrible idea, isn’t it.”

Sentences beginning with “I wonder” are not questions—they’re simply pondering declarations—and do not conclude with question marks. I wonder who’s kissing her now. I wonder what the king is doing tonight. I wonder, wonder who—who-oo-oo-oo—who wrote the book of love.

GENERALLY, in nontechnical, nonscientific text, write out numbers from one through one hundred and all numbers beyond that are easily expressed in words—that is, two hundred but 250, eighteen hundred but 1,823.

The livestock tallies are set in numerals; the acreage, its own thing, can hold on to words.

Note as well that even if the mind may be hearing “August eleventh,” one doesn’t, in just about any context, write “August 11th.” I don’t know why; one just doesn’t.

Particularly numbery things, like ball game scores (“The Yankees were up 11–2”) and Supreme Court rulings (“the 7–2 decision in the Dred Scott case”), look best expressed in numerals. Plus they give you the chance to make good use of those excellent en dashes.

A crucial, crucial thing about numbers, no matter how they’re styled: They need to be accurate. As soon as a writer writes the likes of “Here are twelve helpful rules for college graduates heading into the job market,” copy editors start counting. You’d be surprised at how many lists of twelve things contain only eleven things. This is an easy thing to overlook, but don’t. Otherwise you’ll find yourself with a chapter titled “67 Assorted Things to Do (and Not to Do) with Punctuation” that contains only 66 assorted things. Because I skipped no. 38. Did you notice?

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.

But here’s an idea: Let’s say you’re writing a novel in which the characters shimmy easily between English and, say, Spanish. Consider not setting the Spanish (or what-have-you) in italics. Use of italics emphasizes foreignness. If you mean to suggest easy fluency, use of roman normalizes your text. (I figured this one out a number of years ago, working on a memoir whose generally English-speaking Filipino American characters’ speech was punctuated with bits of Tagalog, and I’ve suggested the technique to many writers since. Writers seem to find it ingenious, and—bonus—it cuts down on italics, which, used in excess, irk the eye.*4)

Now it can be told: That island to the east of Ireland is called Great Britain, or just plain Britain. Great Britain comprises Scotland (up at the top), Wales (down and to the left), and England (the chunk in the middle). 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. England, Scotland, Wales, and, as of this writing, the portion of Ireland politically designated Northern Ireland constitute the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

I do believe, though, that if as a writer you know how to do a thing, it’s not terribly important that you know what it’s called.

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.

Seems like a waste of a good “also” to me.

Q. Is it “It is I who is late” or “It is I who am late”? A. It’s “I’m late.” Why make things more complicated than they need to be?

The use in prose of the singular “they”—that is, the application of the pronoun “they” to an individual human being whose gender is neither specified nor, at the moment, relevant—tends to raise the eyebrows of many of us of a certain age, because at some point in the journey of our lives we were either taught or simply inferred—because we never saw it used in the books and magazines and newspapers we read—that it was incorrect. What we saw, over and over, was something like this: [A] beginning writer…worries to think of his immaturity, and wonders how he ever dared to think he had a word worth saying. —DOROTHEA BRANDE, Becoming a Writer (1934) The 1934 copy editor might well say that the pronoun “he” is perfectly appropriate in such cases, because of course by “he” we simply mean any sort of person at all.

The use of the construction “s/he,” which, truth and happily to tell, I didn’t run across all that often. Because it’s hideous.

Yet so apparently deeply felt was the proscription against the singular “they” that only rarely, once-in-a-blue-moon rarely, did I meet up with a writer who reached for it. And I did what any self-respecting copy editor in those days would do: I got rid of it. But how? How can you dispose of a he-that’s-not-a-he without resorting to a they-that’s-not-a-they without tying into knots either oneself or someone else’s prose? One easy out was always to grab the opportunity to turn a singular noun into a plural one, thus obviating the need for a singular pronoun: “A student should be able to study whatever he likes” transforms easily into “Students should be able to study whatever they like.”