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

by Benjamin Dreyer

Parallelism is the principle that parts of a sentence that are parallel in meaning should be parallel in construction.” In this case, “as real” and “realer than” do not match in construction, as you’ll note if, in my original sentence, you flip them around: I think of the Internet as a real place, realer than or as real Des Moines.

I tend to think of it thus: If I could insert the words “in fact” after “if I,” I might well go with a “was” rather than a “were.” Also, if you’re acknowledging some action or state of being that most certainly did occur—that is, if by “if” what you really mean is “in that”—you want a “was”:

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.

By the way, characters who nod needn’t nod their heads, as there’s really not much else available to nod. And the same goes for the shrugging of unnecessarily-alluded-to shoulders. What else are you going to shrug? Your elbows?

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.

For fiction written in the past tense, here’s a technique for tackling flashbacks that I stumbled upon years ago, and writers I’ve shared it with have tended to get highly excited: Start off your flashback with, let’s say, two or three standard-issue “had”s (“Earlier that year, Jerome had visited his brother in Boston”), then clip one or two more “had”s to a discreet “ ’d” (“After an especially unpleasant dinner, he’d decided to return home right away”), then drop the past-perfecting altogether when no one’s apt to be paying attention and slip into the simple past (“He unlocked his front door, as he later recalled it, shortly after midnight”). Works like a charm.

Italics for emphasis in dialogue can be helpful, but use them sparingly. For one thing, readers don’t always relish being told, in such a patently obvious fashion, how to read.

No sibilants = no hissing.

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

The lesson being that notwithstanding all the commonly asserted rules of prose one has been taught in school or read about in stylebooks, authors do, as Wolcott Gibbs recognized and, now, so do I, have their preservable styles, and the role of a copy editor is, above all else, to assist and enhance and advise rather than to correct—indeed, not to try to transform a book into the copy editor’s notion of what a good book should be but, simply and with some measure of humility, to help fulfill an author’s vision and make each book into the ideal version of itself. The other lesson being, I suppose, that Rick Russo is terribly observant of the things one posts on one’s office door even if he doesn’t mention it at the time.

You could certainly do worse than to follow the standard of Gore Vidal’s immortal Myra Breckinridge: “I am fortunate in having no gift at all for characterizing in prose the actual speech of others and so, for literary purposes, I prefer to make everyone sound like me.”

Reading fiction aloud highlights strengths and exposes weaknesses. I heartily recommend it.

As a rule, the consumption of beverages is not as interesting as many writers seem to think it is.

It goes without saying, though I’m happy to say it, that no one expects you to memorize the spelling of every word in the notoriously irregular, unmemorizable English language.

AD NAUSEAM Not spelled “ad nauseum.”

BOOKKEEPER The only legitimate English word I’m aware of that includes three consecutive sets of double letters,*6 and in writing it you’re quite apt to forget the second k.*7

CAPPUCCINO Two p’s and two c’s. Also, there is no x in “espresso,” but you knew that already.

CONSENSUS Not “concensus.” DACHSHUND Two h’s. DAIQUIRI Three i’s. DAMMIT It’s not “damnit,” goddammit and damn it all to hell, and I wish people would knock it off already.

DUMBBELL Double b. The odds are good that left to your own devices you’re going to spell this “dumbell,” as you’re also likely to attempt “filmaker,” “newstand,” and “roomate.” Well, don’t.

FORTY Rarely to never misspelled on its own, but there’s something about a follow-up “four” that leads, occasionally, to “fourty-four.” FUCHSIA

INDISPENSABLE Microsoft Word’s spellcheck believes “indispensible” to be correct; no one else I know does, and it rarely makes it to print.

MILLENNIUM, MILLENNIA, MILLENNIAL Two l’s, two n’s. In each. It’s always fun online to catch someone attempting to insult millennials yet unable to spell “millennials.”

Somewhat to my Yankee surprise, there’s scant consensus (and much feuding) among my southern confederates as to whether “y’all” may properly be applied to just one person (and I leave discussion of the death-defying “all y’all” for another day) but near unanimity that non-southerners ought not to use it at all, y’all.

They’re not, I’ve discovered, apt to be dissuaded from their prejudices by the evidence of centuries of literate literary usage or recitations from the bracingly peeve-dismantling Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. And they’re certainly not likely to be moved by the suggestion that English is in a constant state of evolution and that if our great-grandmothers ever caught us using the noun “store” when what we should have said was “shop” or using “host” as a verb, they’d wash our mouths out with soap.

If “irritate” bores or otherwise aggravates you, can you avail yourself of one of its synonyms—among them “annoy,” “exasperate,” and, my favorite, “vex”—and save yourself, as Jewish mothers have expressed it from time immemorial, the aggravation?

That said, “anxious” comes in handy for things you’re excited about that are nonetheless spawning stomach butterflies. A first date, say.

The inarguably—so don’t argue with me—correct phrase is “based on.”

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.

My own never-say-die attitude toward preserving “bemusement” to mean perplexity, and only that, is beginning to give me that General Custer vibe.

In that “champing” and “chomping” are as virtually indistinguishable in meaning as they are in spelling, the condemnation of “chomping” strikes me as trifling.

As an adjective, it rankles.

“The English alphabet comprises twenty-six letters.” This is correct.

Use plain “comprise” to mean “made up of” and you’re on safe ground. But as soon as you’re about to attach the word “of” to the word “comprise,” raise your hands to the sky and edit yourself. Once you’ve lowered your hands.

I appreciate its indirect sarcasm, and the more people hate on it, the more apt I am to use it.

If you say “different to,” you’re likely a Brit, and that’s OK too.

I’ll meet you in the middle. Feel free to use “enormity” to describe something that is not only big but monstrously, freakishly so or to describe something arduous (“the enormity of my workload”). Avoid it in positive uses (“the enormity of her talent”) because it’s a needless eyebrow raiser.

Less strictly speaking, an epicenter is a hub of activity, often but not always malignant activity.

I myself don’t care much for fanciful uses of “epicenter,” mostly because I think that “center” does the job just fine.

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.”

“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).

amount.” Thus “I have less than two hundred dollars” or “I weigh less than two hundred pounds” or “a country that’s gone to hell in less than five months,” because it’s not really the individual months one’s interested in, merely the relative brevity of the decline. That said—and there’s always a “that said,” isn’t there—one does not say “one fewer,” both because it’s achingly unidiomatic and because it wrecks the title of the Bacharach-David classic “One Less Bell to Answer.”

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.

“fortuitous” to mean fortunate or favorable, it’s universally acceptable so long as the good fortune or favor is accidental, because that’s what “fortuitous” means: by chance

ungapatchka.)

intransitive verb (the sort that doesn’t take an object).

“Hoi polloi” is ancient Greek for “the many,” and it’s a term some people haul out when they’re looking to insult those they think they’re better than and want something jazzier than “the great unwashed” or “proles.”

A favored explanation for this confusion is that “hoi polloi” in such cases is being confused with “hoity-toity,” which you may recognize as a synonym for “fancy-shmancy,”*8 but its being explicable doesn’t make it right.*9

“Thankfully” and “hopefully” are, in these uses, disjunct adverbs, meaning that they modify not any particular action in the sentence (as they would in, say, “she thankfully received the gift” or “he hopefully approached his boss for a raise”) but the overall mood of the speaker of the sentence (or simply the sentence itself).

Moreover, while “famous” is at least applied to people who are at least reasonably celebrated and widely recognized, “iconic” seems lately to be desperately applied to people who are barely even well known.

but do try to reserve it for big-ticket items.