‘Dreyer’s English’ a witty, useful guide to writing

Author explores rules and unhelpful, useless non-rules of prose with dubious origins

Most best-selling books benefit from the anonymous work of copy editors.

Dreyer’s English has a copy editor’s name right on the cover.

The subtitle of Benjamin Dreyer’s best-seller, An Utterly Correct Guide to

Clarity and Style, is a tongue-in-cheek hint of the light touch within. He really is an expert — vice president, executive managing editor and copy chief of Random House — but he’s more interested in sharing his love for great writing than in rapping anyone’s knuckles. Well, mostly.

The result is a very useful style guide that’s also a delight to read. Dreyer believes in rules, and he explains them with admirable clarity. But he also believes most rules have exceptions — and that some shouldn’t even be rules.

Take that last sentence. I’ll bet many of you were taught to never start a sentence with “and” or “but.” And wait a minute, I just split an infinitive. What kind of pickle are we in?

That last sentence is an example of the third of what Dreyer calls “The Big Three” in his chapter “Rules and Nonrules.” He writes, “Why are they nonrules? So far as I’m concerned, because they’re largely unhelpful, pointlessly constricting, feckless, and useless. Also because they’re generally of dubious origin, devised out of thin air, then passed on until they’ve gained respectable so- lidity and, ultimately, have ossified.”

So, he recommends, start a sentence with “and” or “but” when it works. Follow the example of Raymond Chandler, whose reaction to being copy-edited Dreyer quotes admiringly: “When I split an infinitive, G-d----t, I split it so it will stay split.” And if your choice is to end a sentence with a preposition in a way that sounds natural or to “tie a sentence into a strangling knot to avoid a prepositional conclusion,” do the natural thing. He does note, though, that before you start breaking rules, you need to know what they are.

As he tells it, Dreyer wandered into copy editing as a freelancer in the 1990s and found he had a knack for it. His instincts, though, were there in childhood. He describes being sent to the bakery by his mother when he was a boy and being “fascinated” by a sign that misused quotation marks: “This, as they say in the comic books, is my origin story.”

Several of the chapters offer helpful lists of troublesome words and names, and he makes even those entertaining. He identifies T.S. Eliot as “Person ultimately responsible for Cats” and Finnegans Wake as “A novel by James Joyce that you’ve either not read, not comprehended, or both, despite what you tell people.” Of the trademark Reddi-Wip, he writes, “I’m trying to imagine the meeting in which someone inquired, ‘How much can we misspell two perfectly simple words?’”

For anyone who loves the English language and hates to see it battered and abused, there’s an orange elephant in the room these days.

Dreyer never names him, but he gets a few licks in.

And that brings me to what makes the tone of Dreyer’s English so appealing. He lays out the rules, but it’s done in a spirit of compromise, of wanting to help people understand them with the aim of making everyone’s writing better.