Benjamin Dreyer, copy chief of Random House, pulls together much of his accumulated wisdom into this prose guide. It's in many ways exactly what you'd expect, but Dreyer's wit - which couldn't be any drier - makes for an entertaining read. I found the second half of the book quite a slog compared to the first - the easy reading gave way to endless lists, which to me always felt like something better suited for Google rather than a book; I'd suggest Dreyer's English is most useful to a beginning writer, or perhaps one who's never read a book on grammar.
For those who want to see the full list of things I learned, check out my book notes.
Dreyer's English by Benjamin Dreyer (August 2020)
I liked how Dreyer relies on common sense to explain certain ideas rather than referring to the fine print in the hypothetical all-powerful grammar rulebook. For example, he explains away the passive voice by noting that the best way to improve a sentence is by introducing the protagonist at the start. He also uses this approach as he describes the way an old standby is going out of fashion - removing articles from the title of a work if it's the object of a possessive noun - noting that odd results (he cites James Joyce's Dead) are leading writers to rethink the approach.
I also appreciated his solution-oriented approach to untangling convoluted writing. The challenge of punctuation collisions when a sentence ends with a quoted portion is familiar to any writer, but rather than including a prescription based on underlying grammar rules Dreyer instead suggests rearranging the sentence. He offers a similar hint for certain pluralized last names, using "the Jones's" as an example - "the Jones family" is a smoother expression. His diagnostic tools for certain conundrums have a similar mood, such as how to use whom (it's a replacement for him, her, or them rather than he, she, or they) or identifying the passive construction (if you can add "by zombies" to the end, it's likely in passive voice). I think the best writing advice (like great advice in general) is whatever gets the writer to the next sentence, and for the most part this book exemplifies my philosophy.
Dreyer's suggestion that ending a sentence with a noun is preferred to a preposition ending reminded me of my strategy during job interviews, or for any situation where my spoken sentences threaten to become paragraphs - the noun is a much more effective way to signal that it's someone else's turn. If I had to pick one or the other (not that I, or anyone, should) I would suggest this is more important in speech, where the speaker has no way to verbalize the punctuation that often ends a sentence, period.
The idea of using consistent number styling within a paragraph reminded me of a comment from Edward Tufte's (The) Visual Display of Quantitiative Information, which described a graphic as a paragraph about the data, and reminded readers throughout that great graphics allow the eye to make easy comparisons. Although a written paragraph hardly carries the same visual responsibility as the infographic, the writer should remember that as words become sentences and sentences form paragraphs, the most important task is to help the reader navigate the increasing complexity - consistent styling is but one of many tools for this task.
As a closing note, Dreyer states his admiration of Shirley Jackson's work through this book, and it convinced me to try a collection of her short stories. I'll write about these sometime in the next couple of months.
TOA Rating: Three semicolons out of four.
