Dreyer's English (Adapted for Young Readers)

Benjamin Dreyer is vice president, executive managing editor and copy chief, of Random House. He began his publishing career as a freelance proofreader and copy editor, joining Random House as a production editor in 1993. He has copyedited books by authors including E. L. Doctorow, David Ebershoff, Frank Rich, and Elizabeth Strout, as well as Let Me Tell You, a volume of previously uncollected work by Shirley Jackson. A graduate of Northwestern University, he lives in New York City. Visit him online at BenjaminDreyer.com and follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @BCDreyer.

Chapter 1

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (Your Prose)

Here s your first challenge:

Go a week without writing the words

very

kind of/sort of

really

totally

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. 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. *

* Actually has been a weakness of mine my entire life, speaking and writing, and I realized that it was contagious the first time I heard my two-year-old nephew declare, Actually, I like peas.

If you can go a week without writing any of what I ve come to think of as the Wan Intensifiers and Throat Clearers--I wouldn t ask you to go a week without saying them; that would render most people silent--you will at the end of that week be a considerably better writer than you were at the beginning. The Wan Intensifiers add nothing. Avoid them.

I wouldn t necessarily call that a rule of good writing; writing isn t always about rules. That said, I have nothing against rules. They re indispensable when playing Monopoly or chess, and their observance can go a long way toward improving a ride on the subway. The rule of law? Big fan.

The English language, though, is not so easily ruled and regulated. It developed without codification, sucking up new constructions and vocabulary every time some foreigner set foot on the British Isles--to say nothing of the mischief we Americans have wreaked on it these last few centuries--and continues to evolve anarchically. It has, to my great dismay, no enforceable laws, much less someone to enforce the laws it doesn t have.

Certain prose rules are essentially inarguable--that a sentence s subject and its verb should agree in number, for instance. Or that in a not only x but y construction, the x and the y must be parallel elements. (More on this in Chapter 4: A Little Grammar Is a Dangerous Thing.) Why? I suppose because these prose rules are firmly entrenched, because no one cares to argue with them, and because they help us use our words to their best purpose: to communicate clearly with our readers. Let s call these reasons the Four C s: Convention. Consensus. Clarity. Comprehension.

Also simply because a well-constructed sentence sounds better. Literally sounds better. One of the best ways to determine whether your writing is well constructed is to read it aloud. A sentence that can t readily be spoken is a sentence that likely needs to be rewritten.

A good sentence, I find myself saying frequently, is one that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter how long it is, without having to double back in confusion because the writer misused or omitted a key piece of punctuation, chose a vague or misleading pronoun, or in some other way engaged in inadvertent misdirection.

As much as I like a good rule, I m an enthusiastic subscriber to the notion of rules are meant to be broken --once you ve learned them, I hasten to add.

Right now, let s attend to a few of what I think of as the Great Nonrules of the English Language. You ve encountered all of these; you ve probably been taught them in school. I d like you to free yourself of them. They re not helping you; all they re doing is clogging your