Copyright © 2019 by Benjamin Dreyer All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. A brief portion of this work was originally published by The Toast (the-toast.net) in “Shirley Jackson and Me” on August 4, 2015. The backgrounds of the title and part-title pages are from Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1981) and are used here by permission of the publisher. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Dreyer, Benjamin, author. Title: Dreyer’s English : an utterly correct guide to clarity and style / Benjamin Dreyer. Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018027979 | ISBN 9780812995701 | ISBN 9780812995718 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Authorship—Technique. Classification: LCC PN145 .D74 2019 | DDC 808.02—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027979 Ebook ISBN 9780812995718 randomhousebooks.com Book design by Carole Lowenstein, adapted for ebook Cover design: Keenan v5.4 ep Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Epigraph Introduction Part I: The Stuff in the Front Chapter 1: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (Your Prose) Chapter 2: Rules and Nonrules Chapter 3: 67 Assorted Things to Do (and Not to Do) with Punctuation Chapter 4: 1, 2, 3, Go Chapter 5: Foreign Affairs Chapter 6: A Little Grammar Is a Dangerous Thing Chapter 7: The Realities of Fiction Part II: The Stuff in the Back Chapter 8: Notes on, Amid a List of, Frequently and/or Easily Misspelled Words Chapter 9: Peeves and Crotchets Chapter 10: The Confusables Chapter 11: Notes on Proper Nouns Chapter 12: The Trimmables Chapter 13: The Miscellany Outro Things I Like Dedication Acknowledgments About the Author MARTHA. So? He’s a biologist. Good for him. Biology’s even better. It’s less… abstruse. GEORGE. Abstract. MARTHA. ABSTRUSE! In the sense of recondite. (Sticks her tongue out at GEORGE) Don’t you tell me words. —Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I am a copy editor. After a piece of writing has been, likely through numerous drafts, developed and revised by the writer and by the person I tend to call the editor editor and deemed essentially finished and complete, my job is to lay my hands on that piece of writing and make it…better. Cleaner. Clearer. More efficient. Not to rewrite it, not to bully and flatten it into some notion of Correct Prose, whatever that might be, but to burnish and polish it and make it the best possible version of itself that it can be— to make it read even more like itself than it did when I got to work on it. That is, if I’ve done my job correctly. On the most basic level, professional-grade copyediting entails making certain that everything on a page ends up spelled properly. (The genius writer who somehow can’t spell is a mythical beast, but everyone mistypes things.) And to remind you of what you already likely know, spellcheck and autocorrect are marvelous accomplices—I never type without one or the other turned on—but they won’t always get you to the word you meant to use. Copyediting also involves shaking loose and rearranging punctuation— I sometimes feel as if I spend half my life prying up commas and the other half tacking them down someplace else—and keeping an eye open for dropped words (“He went to store”) and repeated words (“He went to the the store”) and other glitches that can take root during writing and revision. There are also the rudiments of grammar to be minded, certainly—applied more formally for some writing, less formally for other writing. Beyond this is where copyediting can elevate itself from what sounds like something a passably sophisticated piece of software should be able to accomplish—it can’t, not for style, not for grammar (even if it thinks it can), and not even for spelling (more on spelling, much more on spelling, later)—to a true craft. On a good day, it achieves something between a really thorough teeth cleaning—as a writer once described it to me—and a whiz-bang magic act. Which reminds me of a story. A number of years ago I was invited to a party at the home of a novelist whose book I’d worked on. It was a blazingly hot summer afternoon, and there were perhaps more people in attendance than the little walled-in garden of this swank Upper East Side townhouse could comfortably accommodate. As the novelist’s husband was a legendary theater and film director,*1 there were in attendance more than a few noteworthy actors and actresses, so while sweating profusely I was also getting in a lot of happy gawking. My hostess thoughtfully introduced me to one actress in particular, one of those wonderfully grand theatrical types who seem, onstage, to be eight feet tall and who turn out, more often than not, to be quite compact, as this one was, and surprisingly lovely and delicate-looking for a woman who’d made her reputation playing, for lack of a better word, dragons. It seemed that the actress had written a book. “I’ve written a book,” she informed me. A memoir, as it turned out. “And I must tell you that when I was sent the copyedited manuscript and saw it all covered with scrawls and symbols, I was quite alarmed. ‘No!’ I exclaimed. ‘You don’t understand!’ ” By this time she’d taken hold of my wrist, and though her grip was light, I didn’t dare to find out what would happen if I attempted to extricate myself from it. “But as I continued to study what my copy editor had done,” she went on, in a whisper that might easily have reached a theater’s uppermost seats had she wanted it to, “I began to understand.” She leaned in close, staring holes into my skull, and I was hopelessly enthralled. “ ‘Tell me more,’ I said.” Pause for effect. “Copy editors,” she intoned, and I can still hear every crisp consonant and orotund vowel, all these years later, “are like priests, safeguarding their faith.” Now, that’s a benediction.*2 I wandered into my job nearly three decades ago—a lot of people wandered into careers in those days; you could just sort of do things—after a few too many years post-university waiting on tables and bartending, attending revival-house double features, and otherwise faffing about. I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up, which is a problem when you’ve already grown up, but thanks to the intercession of a writer friend and a leap of faith on the part of his production editor—that’s the person in a publishing house who squires a book through the copyediting and proofreading process—I found myself doing freelance proofreading work: an assignment here and an assignment there until, after a while, I was taking on this sort of work full-time. Now, proofreading—because that’s your entrée into the business, especially if you have no experience whatsoever—is a basic and mechanical process, and my first jobs were simply to ensure that everything on the copyedited manuscript pages (you kept that stack to your left) had made its way properly onto the accompanying typeset pages (you kept that stack on the right). Mind you, we’re even further back in the paper era than in the garden-party story, so what I was reading on the manuscript pages included not only the writer’s original typing but layers of rewriting and revision in two sets of handwriting—the writer’s own and the copy editor’s —to say nothing of the copyeditorial directives indicated by those mysterious scrawls and symbols. Proofreading requires a good deal of attention and concentration, but it’s all very binary, very yes/no: Something is right or something is wrong, and if it’s wrong you’re expected to notice it and, by way of yet more scrawling, repair it. It’s like endlessly working on one of those spot-the-difference picture puzzles in an especially satanic issue of Highlights for Children. As I dutifully worked away, I became increasingly fascinated by what I observed on the manuscript pages, a kind of conversation in dueling colored pencils between the writer and the copy editor. Because often— almost invariably—the copy editor had gone well beyond fixing misspellings, rearranging punctuation, and attending to errant subject-verb agreement and was digging deeper, more thoughtfully, and considerably more subjectively into the writer’s prose: deleting words a sentence might live without, adding a word here or there in one that was perhaps too tightly constructed for its own good, reordering a paragraph so that it built its case more strongly, calling out the overuse of a writer’s pet adjectives or adverbs. The copy editor might also suggest that a bit of prose was clumsy (“AU: AWK?” would be jotted in the margin)*3 or that a turn of phrase was stale and shopworn (“AU: CLICHÉ?”). Occasionally, if the copy editor had determined that the same point had been made one too many times, or was simply too obvious to be made at all, an entire sentence might simply be crossed out, and the note in the margin would read—saucily, I thought —“AU: WE KNOW.” That isn’t to say that every suggestion a copy editor made was embraced by the writer.