Benjamin Dreyer - Dreyers English (Adapted for Young Readers): Good Advice for Good Writing

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 itbetter. 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 beto make it read even more like itself than it did when I got to work on it.

Fascinating, you say, but Im not a copy editor. Im a student. I write essays and reports and blog posts and maybe the occasional short story. No one cares if my emails have been polished. My friends know what I mean.

And thats probably true. Your friends dont think twice when you text them using mostly emojis and capital letters with no vowels. But what ifstay with mewhat if you dont communicate with just these people for the rest of your life? What if you need to make yourself understood, clearly, by a professor or a boss or a customer or a lawyer? What if you want to impress a potential employer or publisher? Yes, theres spellcheck, and those squiggly lines you mostly ignore that mean something isnt perfect with your grammar. If youre lucky, you can figure out what they mean and make adjustments. But those tools cant fix everything. Spellcheck and autocorrect are marvelous helpsI never type without one or the other turned onbut they wont always get you to the word you meant to use.

What you write and how you write it tells readers as much about you as a selfie. You dont post every selfie you take, do you? You pick the ones that present to the world the person you want to be. Your writing does the same thing; why not show your best self? Just as there are unwritten dress codes for various life eventswhat you wear to a basketball game or a movie versus what you wear to a fancy restaurant or a funeralthere are times when its perfectly acceptable to write in casual shorthand, and there are times when its not.

Dont let the word copyediting make you nervous. Think of it as revising or refining. Whatever you call it, the process involves shaking loose and rearranging punctuationI sometimes feel as if I spend half my life prying up commas and the other half tacking them down someplace elseand keeping an eye open for dropped words (He went to store) and repeated words (He went to the the store) and other glitches. In most cases, you want to obey the basic rules of grammarapplied more formally for some writing, like schoolwork; less formally for other writing, like fiction.

Beyond this is where copyediting can elevate itself from what sounds like something a passably sophisticated piece of software should be able to accomplishit cant, not for style, not for grammar (even if it thinks it can), and not 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 cleaningas a writer once described it to meand a whiz-bang magic act.

Which brings me to you, dear readerIve always wanted to say that, dear reader, and now, having said it, I promise never to say it againand why were here.

Were all of us writers: We write term papers and letters to teachers and product reviews, journals and blog entries, appeals to politicians. Some of us write books. All of us write emails. And, at least as Ive observed it, we all want to do it better: We want to make our points more clearly, more elegantly; we want our writing to be appreciated, to be more effective; we wantto be quite honestto make fewer mistakes.

This book, then, is my chance to share with you, for your own use, some of what I do, from the nuts-and-bolts stuff that even skilled writers stumble over to some of the fancy little tricks Ive come across or devised that can make even skilled writing better.

Lets get started.

No. Wait. Before we get started:

The reason this book is not called The Last Style Manual Youll Ever Need, or something equally ghastly, is because its not. Style manuals, also called stylebooks, are guides that offer best practices on questions of grammar and language. Two common stylebooks youll encounter in the publishing industry are The Chicago Manual of Style and Words into Type. Theyre both comprehensive enough to cover just about everything youll need at this point in your writing life, and youll find more of my picks in Things I Like on page 267. But heres the rub: No single stylebook can ever tell you everything you want to know about writingno two stylebooks, I might add, can ever agree on everything you want to know about writingand in setting out to write this book, I settled on my own ground rules: (1) that I would write about the issues I most often run across while copyediting and how I attempt to address them, about topics where I think I truly have something to add to the conversation, and about curiosities that interest or simply amuse me, and (2) that I would not attempt to replicate the guidance of the exhaustive books that still and always will sit, and be constantly referred to, on my own desk. And, I should add, that I would remember, at least every now and then, to own up to my own specific tastes and noteworthy eccentricities and allow that just because I think something is good and proper you dont necessarily have to.