Home > Work > Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style QUOTES

Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style QUOTES

1 " MARTHA. So? He’s a biologist. Good for him. Biology’s even better. It’s less…abstruse. GEORGE. Abstract. MARTHA. ABSTRUSE! In the sense of recondite. (Sticks her tongue out at GEORGE) Don’t you tell me words. —Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

2 " As a lexicographer friend once confided over sushi, the dictionary takes its cues from use: If writers don’t change things, the dictionary doesn’t change things. "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

3 " I know that back when you were in seventh-grade typing class and pecking away at your Smith Corona Coronet Automatic 12, Mrs. Tegnell taught you to type a double space after a sentence-ending period, but you are no longer in the seventh grade, you are no longer typing on a typewriter, and Mrs. Tegnell is no longer looking over your shoulder. "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

4 " Only godless savages eschew the series comma. "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

5 " 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. "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

6 " The things I like best in T. S. Eliot’s poetry, especially in the Four Quartets, are the semicolons. You cannot hear them, but they are there, laying out the connections between the images and the ideas. Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath. "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

7 " Step back, I’m about to hit the CAPS LOCK key. DO NOT EVER ATTEMPT TO USE AN APOSTROPHE TO PLURALIZE A WORD. “NOT EVER” AS IN “NEVER.” You may reapproach. "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

8 " If there’s a less classy word in the English language to describe classiness than “classy,” I’d like to know what it is. "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

9 " Only godless savages eschew the series comma. No sentence has ever been harmed by a series comma, and many a sentence has been improved by one. "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

10 " A lot can be accomplished in the conveyance of eccentricity of speech with word choice and word order. Make good use of those. "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

11 " But who could possibly read such a sentence and think such a thing? And that’s often the problem, isn’t it? In writing and in so many things: that we accept things we’re taught without thinking about them at all. "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

12 " That the French have had for centuries an académie that keeps a sharp and controlling eye on their language is why it’s easier for a modern French speaker to read and understand Molière than it is for a modern English speaker to read and understand Shakespeare. "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

13 " Reading fiction aloud highlights strengths and exposes weaknesses. I heartily recommend it. "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

14 " If you want your best-seller to be a bestseller, you have to help make that happen. If you want to play videogames rather than video games, go for it. I hope that makes you feel powerful. It should. "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

15 " The habit of inauthentically attributing wisecracks, purported profundities, inspirational doggerel, and other bits of refrigerator-door wisdom to famous people is scarcely new—members of the press, particularly newspaper columnists, have been doing it for decades—but the Internet has grossly exacerbated the problem, with numerous quote-aggregation sites irresponsibly devoted to prettily packaging the fakery, thus encouraging the unwary (or uncaring) to snarf it up, then hork it up, ad nauseam. "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

16 " I think perhaps you don’t finish writing a book. You stop writing it. "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

17 " BAWL/BALL To bawl one’s eyes out is to weep profusely. To ball one’s eyes out would be some sort of sporting or teabagging mishap. "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

18 " I suppose I might just say “If it starts with a capital letter, look it up” and end this chapter right here, but where would be the fun in that? "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

19 " You’re attempting to burrow into the brains of your writers and do for, to, and with their prose what they themselves might have done for, to, and with it had they not already looked at each damn sentence 657 times. "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

20 " It’s like endlessly working on one of those spot-the-difference picture puzzles in an especially satanic issue of Highlights for Children. "

― Benjamin Dreyer , Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style