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

by Benjamin Dreyer

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.

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.

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.

Some of us were also taught to use U.S. (or that other thing) only as an adjective, as in “U.S. foreign policy,” and to refer to the country nounwise only full-out as the United States. I persist in that distinction, because…because I do.

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.

Many journalist types, I’ve observed, abhor the series comma because they’ve been trained to abhor it and find its use as maddening as its champions find its nonuse infuriating.

As a rule you should avoid comma splicing, though exceptions can be and frequently are made when the individual sentences are reasonably short and intimately connected: “He came, he saw, he conquered” or “Your strengths are your weaknesses, your weaknesses are your strengths.”

Will you go to London too? Will you go to London, too? Q. When do I precede a sentence-ending “too” with a comma, and when not? A. Whichever you choose, the other way will look better.