The Immaculately Named Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

Alright, let’s talk a little about writing. I love writing. It’s basically what I do with all of my free time. Over the last decade or so of dedicated writing, I have come across some helpful tools, which I want to share with you here.

So, writing is a process that goes through stages. The first stage comes before you write a single word: conceiving something to write about. This is a difficult stage, as it seems like almost everything has already been written, but I promise you, there are plenty of things left to write about.

But that isn’t what I’m going to talk about today.

The next step in the writing process is completely optional, and in fact there are passionate devotees to both doing it and not doing it. This stage is the plotting, planning, and outlining of what you are going to write. Personally, I’m a big fan of knowing what I’m going to say, but there are wildly successful writers who have never outlined a single word of their work.

This is also not what I’m going to talk about today.

Now we reach the joy of the writing process: actually putting your words on the page. This, for me, is the easy part, and over time it hopefully becomes both easy and, more importantly, fun for you, too. If you can’t get to the point where you enjoy the writing, you should really look to another avenue for getting your work out there. I hear podcasting is a big thing.

But this is also not what I’m going to talk about today.

After you’ve come up with your singular idea, after you’ve either done your planning or not, after you’ve put all your beautiful words in order, then comes the real work of writing. Then comes the editing.

Now editing comes in primarily two parts. There is big, structural editing. This is where you look at things like the beats or plot points, the anchors of what you are writing, and figure out whether the story is moving and paced well. This is where you look at each chapter and ask yourself, “Is story actually happening here?” This is where you consider things like foreshadowing and allusion, tropes and themes.

This is also not what I’m going to talk about today.

What I am going to talk about today is the smaller editing, the dealing with the nuts and bolts of how sentences are constructed, what is called copy editing. For many writers, this can be a brutal, interminable slog, as it might have been decades since your freshman English class where your teacher reviewed the Eleven Rules for Commas.

Don’t worry. Benjamin Dreyer is here to help.

Now, any writer of A Certain Age is familiar with the iconic stye guide Strunk & White’s Elements of Style. I have a well worn copy of my own. Not to impugn this classic work at all, but recently we have been blessed with a style guide that is more exhaustive, wittier, and more accessible: Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. Benjamin Dreyer is the Copy Chief for Random House, one of the preeminent publishing houses in the world, and he has been editing some of the best writers for decades now.

I’m not going to tell you to get this book—or sure, borrow it from your local library. I love libraries—just because it has an aesthetically textured cover and it is remarkably pleasant to hold in one’s hand, but that certainly doesn’t detract from the read at all. Also, there is no reason to read this book cover to cover like some linear novel. It can be taken in pieces, in chunks, wholly out of order, without losing any of its elucidatory strength.

To be clear, this book does not merely dwell on the minutia of punctuation, though it does straighten out a number of things you might be confusing, punctuation wise. 67 things, to be precise. It also, however, deals with some other writerly ways that sentences end up being less than they could be. Take, for example, this challenge in the opening chapter:

Here’s your first challenge:

Go a week without writing

• Very

• Rather

• Really

• Quite

• In fact

And you can toss in—or, that is, toss out—“just” (not in the sense of “righteous” but in the sense of “merely”) and “so” (in the “extremely” sense, though as conjunctions go it’s pretty disposable too).

Oh yes: “pretty.” As in “pretty tedious.” Or “pretty pedantic.” Go ahead and kill that particular darling.

And “of course.” That’s right out. And “surely.” And “that said.”

And “actually”? Feel free to go the rest of your life without another “actually.”

The first time I read this book I had to go back through everything I’d ever written and cut so many of what Dreyer calls Wan Intensifiers. Now I can write without using them without even needing to tie myself in knots wrenching a sentence to hand.

After starting with a clean and simple admonition, Dreyer proceeds to abolish rules you might have heard your entire life. He looks at the Big Three rules you can break before covering the Lesser Seven. The former are rules like Never Split an Infinitive, to which he offers the common Star Trek rebuttal; the latter are rules like The Passive Voice Is to Be Avoided, to which he also offers compelling, if less popularly known, counterexamples.

Then he gets to the 67 Assorted Things to Do (Or Not to Do) with Punctuation, which is as comprehensive as you could realistically hope for it to be–for all that he actually only includes sixty-six things, for a callback in the next chapter. At moments he is authoritative (Only godless savages eschew the series comma.), but at other times he is suggestive, merely offering advice, rather than dictating inescapable rules.

Dreyer has thoughts on numbers, eleven of which are shared here. I didn't even know there could be eleven different rules for conveying numbers in prose, but after reading the chapter, I realized a) that there are a wide variety of ways to use numbers and b) that I don't use nearly that many numbers in my writing. Nonetheless, I was glad to learn how to not screw up numbers anymore.

If you write, and in your writing include words in a foreign language, the next chapter will help you enormously. Otherwise, it can be completely skipped. Dreyer does, however touch on the difference between British English and our more comfortable American English, so if you want more ways to dunk on the Brits, maybe don't skip this chapter.

Next, we get to a chapter on grammar minutia, from when to use 'whom' to whether 'one of those things that . . . ' takes a singular or plural verb. Some are simple: Q. Is it "It is I who is late" or "It is I who am late"? A. It's "I'm late." Some take pages to fully address all the iterations of the concept. Almost all of them I needed to know when I first read this book.

Dreyer goes on to address fictional consistency, making sure your characters age appropriately, that you don't do things like have children in Algebra class on Sunday, and that left handed characters actually do things with their left hand all book long. These issues are much more prevalent in historical fiction, where you are setting your book in a world that actually happened, so you need to make sure if the character is watching a show on Wednesday night that said show actually aired on Wednesday nights. Wikipedia is a goldmine for this sort of research. He also touches on a principle I am so guilty of that I spent entire weeks fixing everything I'd written upon its discovery: you can't smile a statement. Therefore, you cannot write: "Hello," he smiled. Let me tell you, I did this all the time and in countless ways.

Next we are treated to a very useful clarification of frequently misspelled words. Now, this is perhaps better deployed as an at-need reference than as a chapter to be read straight through. One might think spellcheckers have delivered us from ever needing to consult such a list, but many words have archaic spellings that might still be included in your word processor. Even beside that, spellcheckers are not infallible. Peruse the list. It might save you from an embarrassing mistake in a crucial piece.

That completes The Stuff in the Front, not the inaccurately named stuff in the first half of the book. This is a good place to take a break and remind yourself that the benefits of writing well are manifold and diverse before diving into The Stuff in the Back.

Dreyer then stirs the pot, listing a number of Peeves and Crotchets, small snippets of language that irritate people. Now, these peeves are not universal, but the people who hate a certain phrase hate it with vehemence. As a result, it is better to avoid their usage, as one person who hates your phrasing will be wildly more vocal about it than dozens of people who take no offense to your word choice at all. And he didn't even address my personal pet peeve: people who use the word 'resiliency' when the perfectly fine word 'resilience' is right there. In his defense, I imagine he watches rather fewer former athletes as sports commentators than I do.

In another handy list, Dreyer covers a number of Confusables, words that even an inerrant, always alert, discriminating spellchecker won't save you from. Here you will find the distinction between words like 'affect/effect' or, more relevant now in light of recent insurrections, 'ferment/foment,' among many others. Even for avid readers, there are pairings here you might confuse, so it is well worth your time to familiar yourself with the distinctions.

Dreyer next clarifies a broad range of frequently flubbed proper nouns. Here he discusses spelling of well known figures (it's Adolf, not Adolph), the question of which titles to italicize and how to punctuate them, and details like whether Frankenstein refers to the doctor or the scientifically created abomination (it's the latter, definitively).

Next we get a chapter on Trimmables, or, as Dreyer puts it, Two Words Where One Will Do. For example, consider 'advance planning' or 'advance warning.' Neither planning nor warning can come after the fact, so they are in advance by definition. This list is terrific for trimming the thoughtless redundancies that color so much of our language.

Finally, Dreyer addresses The Miscellany, or everything he hasn't found another place to mention. This is where you might find the clarification between 911 and 9/11, or whether 'stupider' and 'stupidest' are in fact words. It is useful, though tempting to rush through having reached the end of an exhaustive, albeit delightfully engaging, style guide.

This book helps you more the more you dwell on it. You start by going back and fixing every little mistake in your work, then, over time, you find yourself naturally, easily writing cleaner, more concise prose. I still go back to it when I have questions or need clarity on a particular convention, but the more you use it, the more it simply becomes part of how you think about writing.

Now, maybe you are the kind of person who won’t set themselves to read a style guide, no matter how well written, no matter how drily witty. Well, I have great news for you! There’s also a daily calendar! You can flip through the year, becoming a little wiser in the ways of copy than you were the previous day. Alternatively, there’s a game, for the true nerds among us. I have the game. It’s delightful.

This book is indispensable to writers who, say, blog without the benefit of the oversight of a copy editor. It will also help your professional writing or the academic writing of someone still in school to whom you might be inclined to gift the book. There is even a version for kids for all of you with younger children.

I hope you give the book a look—again, even from a library!—as I have found it to be an invaluable tool in a writer’s toolbox.

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