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

by Benjamin Dreyer

I settled on my own ground rules: that I would write about the issues I most often run across while copyediting and how I attempt to address them, about topics where I thought I truly had something to add to the conversation, and about curiosities and arcana that interested or simply amused me. And that I would not attempt to replicate the guidance of the exhaustive books that still and always will sit, and be constantly referred to, on my own desk.*6

As much as I like a good rule, I’m an enthusiastic subscriber to the notion of “rules are meant to be broken”—once you’ve learned them, I hasten to add.

Let me say this about this: 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.

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. If you follow me.

This is beautifully smart.

In a sentence written in the passive voice, the thing that is acted upon is frontloaded, and the thing doing the acting comes at the end. In either case, we can easily agree that clowns are terrifying.

Here’s a nifty trick that copy editors like to pass among themselves that comes in handy when you’re assessing your own writing: 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.

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

Sometimes a comma makes no sense at all. Suddenly, he ran from the room. Makes it all rather less sudden, doesn’t it.

One may meet a fair number of people who like to aim that term at any old sentence that happens to be long and twisty and made up of any number of innumerable bits divided by semicolons, dashes, parentheses, and whatever else the writer may have had on hand. Nay. A long sentence is a long sentence, it’s only a run-on sentence when it’s not punctuated in the standard fashion. Like that one just now.

Let’s simply call them errant apostrophes. Which is kind of classy, don’t you think?*17 In any event, don’t use them. Not for bananas, potatoes, bagels, princesses, Trumans, Adamses, Obamas, or whatever else you’ve got more than one of.

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.