"Only godless savages eschew the series comma.”
This sentence convinced me I needed to read Dreyer’s English. Nothing makes an editor happier than a passionate opinion about grammar. But that’s just one of the many reasons I give this book five stars and consider it a must-read for both writers and editors.
I’m certainly not alone in this opinion—I’ve heard countless readers and writers gush about it. One of my favorite authors George Saunders blurbed it, saying, “A mind-blower—sure to jumpstart any writing project, just by exposing you, the writer, to Dreyer’s astonishing level of sentence-awareness.”
One of the most common compliments I’ve heard about this book is that it’s “readable.” This may not seem like a big deal, but for a book about language and grammar it’s one of the highest compliments there is.
Because let’s be real, you probably have a huge pile of books that sound much more interesting than one subtitled An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. But Dreyer has done the impossible—made a book about language fun.
The author of this book, Benjamin Dreyer, is the vice president, executive managing editor, and copy chief at Random House. Most of the books I’ve read about writing are written by writers. This is the first one I’ve seen written by an editor.
As a writer, you have so many well-known writers to look up to and emulate. As an editor, you don’t. Hardly anyone knows the editor of their favorite books, even editors like me. It’s exciting to be able to add someone like Dreyer to my list of role models.
Dreyer has mastered a few key things that make this book so readable. One is his conversational and even “cheeky” style of writing. When talking about grammar he says, “I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I hate grammar. Well, OK, not quite true. I don’t hate grammar. I hate grammar jargon.” He explains the rules clearly without using any of the annoying jargon.
I’ve always struggled to remember the technical terms of grammar (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to look up the word “participle”), so I loved this style of teaching. Dreyer makes grammar accessible to everyone.
Another key aspect of his writing is his sense of humor. He asserts himself as an authority on writing but doesn’t take himself too seriously. You never quite know if a footnote will take you to an explanation or an entertaining sidetrack.
Dreyer offers advice that is practical and easy to adopt. He opens his first chapter by saying, “Here’s your first challenge: Go a week without writing:
· very
· rather
· really
· quite
· in fact”
So much advice about writing is some variation of “work hard and eventually you’ll get better.” It’s refreshing to see such simple guidelines: Don’t use these words, and your writing will be better. Easy peasy.
He also explains the rules in a way you can easily wrap your head around. In his section about parentheses, he writes, “A midsentence parenthetical aside (like this one) begins with a lowercase letter and concludes (unless it’s a question or even an exclamation!) without terminal punctuation.” Seeing the rules played out organically makes them that much easier to remember.
Although I love this book (obviously), there are aspects I know some readers won’t like. Although Dreyer doesn’t use grammatical jargon, he loves using obscure words, many of which I had to look up. Admittedly, one of my pet peeves is having to look up a word while reading.
This might just be my marketing brain talking (in marketing, you write at a 6th or 7th grade reading level), but words like this tend to be distracting rather than helpful. Also, if you don’t like reading footnotes, this book may not be for you. The footnotes in this book are done well and offer gems of humor throughout the book, but there are a lot of them, and I know footnotes annoy some readers.
So why should you take time out of your busy life to read this book? Because of what Lyle Lovett says about it: “[Dreyer] makes you smile and makes you smarter at the same time.” What else could a reader ask for?
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