Just feeding my addiction

When I served (briefly) as interim director of our campus Writing Center, I would sometimes arrive first thing in the morning and find that someone working in Center the night before had left a porn site open on one of the computers. Annoying--and very different from the guilty pleasures I indulged in during my own undergraduate service as a writing tutor. True confession time: If I found myself alone in the Writing Center, lacking a client or blessed with some unsupervised free time, I would secretly indulge my addiction to reading style guides.

Yes: I might have started with a taste of Strunk and White, but I soon moved on to the hard stuff--Fowler and Bernstein and the AP Stylebook and even (gasp!) the massive Chicago Manual of Style. I loved exploring lists of easily confused words, examples of dangling participles, and techniques for repairing faulty parallelism. 

The taste has never left me; as evidence I offer my four-foot shelf crammed full of style guides, grammar grumblings, and weird word books: The Transitive Vampire. Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words. Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. So many more, and I love 'em all.

The newest addition to my collection is Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer, a longtime copy editor and now a vice president and copy chief at Random House. But don't let that Utterly Correct subtitle fool you: Dreyer explains grammatical principles clearly, but he understand the language thoroughly enough to know when the rules need to be broken. He rejects those pettifogging rules that are "largely unhelpful, pointlessly constricting, feckless, and useless," explaining that his goal is to provide writers with a rational basis for the choices they make:

Quite a lot of what I do as a copy editor is to help writers avoid being carped at, fairly or--and this is the part that hurts--unfairly, by People Who Think They Know Better and Write Aggrieved Emails to Publishing Houses. Thus I tend to be a bit conservative about flouting rules that may be a bit dubious in their origin but, observed, ain't hurting nobody.

See how he flouts your third-grade teacher's rule against "ain't" in a sentence about flouting rules? Dreyer's playfulness enlivens discussions about normally stodgy topics such as, for instance, ending a sentence with a preposition, which "isn't such a hot idea, mostly because a sentence should, when it can, aim for a powerful finale and not simply dribble off like an old man's unhappy micturition."

He covers the usual suspects--punctuation, numbers, dangling modifiers, frequently confused words--with brevity and verve and memorable images, like this one: "Think of colons as little trumpet blasts, attention-getting and ear-catching. Also loud. So don't use so many of them that you give your reader a headache."

Or this:

As a serial abuser of parentheses, I warn you against their overuse, particularly in the conveyance of elbow-nudging joshingness. One too many coy asides and you, in the person of your writing, will seem like a dandy in a Restoration comedy stepping to the footlights and curling his hand around his mouth to confidentially address the audience. One rather needs a beauty mark and a peruke to get away with that sort of thing.

Also refreshing is Dreyer's appreciation of aesthetics, his attention to both how a sentence sounds and how it looks on the page. "I suppose it's an obvious point," he writes, "but if a style choice follows the rules but results in something that looks awful or makes no sense on the page, rethink it."

And then there are the footnotes, snarky little tidbits in small print well worth the squint, like this comment on a certain unnamed magazine's house style: "If you're going to have a house style, try not to have a house style visible from space." 

(Hmm: Maybe I should shelve Dreyer's book next to Mary Norris's Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, in which the former New Yorker copy editor explains that magazine's devotion to the diaeresis, which doesn't look right no matter how I spell it. Let Norris and Dreyer duke it out between themselves while I'm not looking.)


Sometimes my students complain about having to consult a style guide or wonder why they should care about semicolons or numerals or parallel structure, but they'll never know the joy of consulting competing style guides to track nuances of usage through multiple examples and footnotes. Style guides are my guilty pleasure, toolbox and toybox wrapped up together, and Dreyer's English will make a charming addition to my bookshelf. If I'm an addict, I'm also a pusher: go ahead, give it a taste. You won't be sorry.