Dreyer's English - Benjamin Dreyer 2022
Introduction
By way of introduction
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 it…better. 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 be—to make it read even more like itself than it did when I got to work on it.
Fascinating, you say, but I’m not a copy editor. I’m 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 that’s probably true. Your friends don’t think twice when you text them using mostly emojis and capital letters with no vowels. But what if—stay with me—what if you don’t 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, there’s spellcheck, and those squiggly lines you mostly ignore that mean something isn’t perfect with your grammar. If you’re lucky, you can figure out what they mean and make adjustments. But those tools can’t fix everything. Spellcheck and autocorrect are marvelous helps—I never type without one or the other turned on—but they won’t 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 don’t 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 events—what you wear to a basketball game or a movie versus what you wear to a fancy restaurant or a funeral—there are times when it’s perfectly acceptable to write in casual shorthand, and there are times when it’s not.
Don’t 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 punctuation—I sometimes feel as if I spend half my life prying up commas and the other half tacking them down someplace else—and 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 grammar—applied 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 accomplish—it can’t, 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 cleaning—as a writer once described it to me—and a whiz-bang magic act.
✵ ✵ ✵
Which brings me to you, dear reader—I’ve always wanted to say that, “dear reader,” and now, having said it, I promise never to say it again—and why we’re here.
We’re 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.*1 And, at least as I’ve 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 want—to be quite honest—to 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 I’ve come across or devised that can make even skilled writing better.
Let’s get started.
No. Wait. Before we get started:
The reason this book is not called The Last Style Manual You’ll Ever Need, or something equally ghastly, is because it’s not. Style manuals, also called stylebooks, are guides that offer best practices on questions of grammar and language. Two common stylebooks you’ll encounter in the publishing industry are The Chicago Manual of Style and Words into Type. They’re both comprehensive enough to cover just about everything you’ll need at this point in your writing life, and you’ll find more of my picks in Things I Like on page 267. But here’s the rub: No single stylebook can ever tell you everything you want to know about writing—no two stylebooks, I might add, can ever agree on everything you want to know about writing—and 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.*2 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 don’t necessarily have to.
Though you should.
SKIP NOTES
*1 We also text and tweet, and these activities have spawned their own rules, which is that there are very few rules. Don’t be fooled: Texting and tweeting are not reliable ways of making yourself universally understood. Anyone not familiar with the social media world will have no idea what you mean if you write IDK TTYL when you email them. And if you don’t care because who’s not familiar with the social media world?, then consider the following, from I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, by Erika L. Sánchez: “Standard English…is the language of power….It means that you…speak and write in a way that will give you authority. Does that mean that the way you speak in your neighborhood is wrong? That slang is bad?…Absolutely not. That form of speaking is often fun, inventive, and creative, but would it be helpful to speak that way in a job interview? Unfortunately not.”
*2 For the record: Of course you need to own a dictionary. Get yourself a copy of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary—in its eleventh edition, as of this writing. Professional copy editors will also never be without Words into Type, a splendid volume that long ago went out of print but copies of which are relatively easily found online, and The Chicago Manual of Style, whose edicts I don’t always agree with but whose definitive bossiness is, in its way, comforting.