Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style Hardcover – January 29, 2019

At first it seemed amusing, or rather the Facebook banter about the book seemed amusing. Intrigued by a friend’s comments about her personal use of the exclamation point, I clicked the link she had posted to a New York Times article about Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. That title! I mean, it takes a lot of courage, confidence, and chutzpah to claim one’s guide as utterly correct.I knew I had to have that book ASAP and ordered it that very hour. It arrived two days later, and I’ve been enjoying Dreyer’s writing ever since. Dreyer is funny but serious, knowledgeable but not pedantic, experienced but not condescending. I have a dogeared copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, an up-to-date edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, and two Grammar Girl (Mignon Fogarty) books, my favorite being The Grammar Devotional: Daily Tips for Successful Writing from Grammar Girl. Those are my go-to sources, so why did I order the ultimate guide and why am I liking it so much?I ordered it because whether editing my own work or someone else’s, I need all the help I can get. And I want that help to be delivered by a practicing expert, one who walks the talk, someone like Dreyer who’s the copy chief at Random House. Dreyer’s English is an invaluable tool, a veritable treasure chest of information, some new and some old. As a person who’s worked thirty years as a copy editor, Dreyer is committed not only to what he does for Random House authors but also to helping anyone who wants to improve their writing. (I’m not sure whether the correct pronoun should be his or her, his, her, or their so I stuck with the latter. For now, I’m sharing a few things I learned the first hour.1. I need to use fresh terms. On the first page of Chapter 1, Dreyer challenges his readers to go one week without using very, rather, really, quite, and in fact. I gulped. Those are some of my most commonly used words. He goes on to recommend tossing out just, pretty, of course, surely, and that said. And that’s just on the first page. I’m in trouble, I thought. (Incidentally, Dryer doesn’t recommend the use of Italics when expressing a writer’s thoughts, but well, I’m in the learning stage.) It took only a few seconds to construct a silly sentence using six of those words/phrases. It would really be very hard for me to go just one day without writing these rather common words and quite impossible, in fact, to go a week.2. I can use the Oxford if I so desire and ignore the know-it-alls who tell me it’s passé. Dreyer says, “Only godless savages eschew the series comma.” Whether you call it series or Oxford, use it. In the first of the two sentences below, I’m visualizing green beans folded into chocolate pudding. In the second, I see them as separate dishes. I prefer pudding as dessert, not part of a vegetable dish.“For dinner, we’re having grilled pork chops, rice, green beans and pudding.”“For dinner, we’re having pork chops, rice, green beans, and pudding.”3. Certain prose rules are essentially inarguable. For instance, a subject and verb should always agree in number. At the same time, he claims to be an “enthusiastic subscriber” to the concept that rules are made to be broken—once you’ve learned them. He shares a humorous story about a hoity toity person who gets her just reward after haughtily correcting someone who ended a sentence with a preposition. And if Dreyer says it’s okay to begin a sentence with And or But (he does), that’s good enough for me.Throughout the book, there are rules (and softer guidelines), anecdotes, tips, examples, and fascinating footnotes. Dreyer delivers his message in a factual but fun way. Although the reader knows that he’s dead serious about the importance of grammar, punctuation, and word choice in making one’s writing clear and elegant, he makes his points without being dry or preachy.I’m sure Benjamin Dreyer wouldn’t approve of the exclamation point after “That Title!” in the first paragraph, but to use a cliché (which he says to avoid like the plague), Rome wasn’t built in a day. From this day forward, I’ll be checking my exclamation points and clichés at the door.

This is a great book, witty and packed with information and insight regarding written English. It is the only book I’ve ever read that, upon completion of my first (always careful) reading, I immediately returned to the beginning and re-read the whole thing even more carefully. Thank you, Mr. Dreyer, for your excellent work! Five stars, for sure.But that’s not to say it is a PERFECT book. Indeed, given that this book was written by a top-notch copy editor, and given that it underwent review by at least one other top-notch copy editor, I was surprised to find myriad awkward phrases and other anomalies—even likely errors—in the finished product.What follows is my nitpicky list of complaints. And remember, if God did not intend for us to nitpick, S/He/It would not have made it so much fun to nitpick!Page 14:“A sentence written in the passive voice is one whose subject would, in a sentence constructed in the active voice, be its object.”This is a non-definition. If you flip “passive” and “active,” the sentence is still true, but it’s still a non-definition. (In the latter case, it’s a non-definition of a sentence in the active voice.)Page 63:“I’ve also seen attempted, in an attempt to style the last example, the use of multiple hyphens,”Use of the base word “attempt” twice in four words!Page 68:“…it makes it easier for the reader to easily compare things…”Use of the base word “easy” twice in a short phrase.Page 96:“Flipping restlessly through the channels, John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was playing on TCM.”Was that supposed to be “TMC”—The Movie Channel, or “TCM”—Turner Classic Movies?Page 116:“In the event, I eventually realized…”Use of event/eventually separated by just one word.Page 149:“…save yourself, as Jewish mothers have expressed it from time immemorial, the aggravation?”Why the question mark? Is this a cultural joke that’s too sophisticated for my simple comprehension?Page 182:“… ‘disassociate’ gets a lot of rocks thrown at it; I can’t say that it bothers me.”To what does the second “it” refer? Is it the word “disassociate,” or is it the getting “a lot of rocks thrown at it.” I originally read this as the latter, meaning the Mr. Dreyer disapproves of the word “disassociate.” But then, maybe it’s the former, meaning Mr. Dreyer approves of “disassociate.” I dunno.Page 189:In the section on Gibe/Jibe/Jive, Mr. Dreyer failed to give a definition for “Jive.”Page 210:In Chapter 11, “Notes on Proper Nouns,” the subsection headings (e.g., “Bud Abbott”) are shown in all-upper-case font (“BUD ABBOTT”), with actual upper case letters indicated by a SLIGHTLY larger font that is easy to miss. Since many of the issues addressed in this chapter involve when, and when not, to use upper case, this represents a particularly inappropriate typesetting decision.Page 221:“See also ‘irony,’ this page.”The phrase “this page” is a hotlink back to Mr. Dreyer’s section on irony. The trouble is, I completely failed to see any connection between the reference (irony) and the topic of this subsection (a mysterious person named Alanis Morissette). Then I googled the name and found out that Ms. Morissette has a song called “Ironic.” Ha ha. (I mean, aren't some jokes just too lame to make it into print?)Page 263:“A reversal is a total 180.”But in the corresponding footnote 10, on page 264, Mr. Dreyer asks, “Is the term ‘full 180’ tautological?” Either the word “total” or the word “full” should be used in both places. I mean, you want to make the text and the footnote matchy-matchy, right?Page 263:“‘Stupider’ and ‘stupidest’ are too words.”What a head scratcher! I showed this to my wife and she couldn’t make heads or tails of it, either. Should that be “two” instead of “too”? But that would transform the sentence into a pointless statement of a trivial fact. What on Earth was Mr. Dreyer trying to communicate here?

Essencial!

This book has be incredibly useful. My writing from after I read this required significantly less editing than before.It was also a delight to read; straightforward, honest, and laced with wry humor. I loved his tenancy to illustrate each point by breaking the rule he was trying to instill.It deals mostly with line edits and sentence level issues, and the occasion scene problem rather than the larger ones that developmental edits would tackle.

Ciekawa i pomocna książka. Przydatna przy korekcie tekstów angielskich.

If Stanley Tucci had written a book about grammar - I reckon it would turn out a bit like this.This book was recommended to me and to be honest, I wasn't sure I would enjoy - I mean, who DOES enjoy reading about oxford commas and the value of a semi-colon?But this book is so lightly, cleverly written I'm reading it twice - once for the pure enjoyment and the second time to digest the learning. Fabulous.

Thank you for mentioning Norris. But this is the only good thing about your critic, which is great writing but missing facts. I was buying over 200 hundred books for learning style for my native German, for English, for learning French, Italian, and even Danish to get the hang of it, only Dreyer did it, my hope, finally. You could prevent others from this experience. Dangerous for the seeker. Norris is 5 stars, but can't be compared. And nothing wrong with chapter 7. So for you: “Dismissed,” I make my dirty face.