Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

reading about editing books is very satisfying

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

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Read based on the review of KimMie”! I’d say this book is a good corollary to Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, especially if you are someone not-from-Wee-Britain who is now living in Wee-Britain and writing things on a regular basis (e.g., for work). It’s sort of broken into two halves. The first is a very enjoyable meditation on the nature of writing, copy editing, and overall style. Dreyer has a droll voice, likely honed from years of sifting through talented but messing manuscripts […]

He had me at apostrophes

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

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On page 36 of Dreyer’s English, author and Random House copy chief Benjamin Dreyer makes use of the fearsome CAPS LOCK key to make a point about never, EVER using an apostrophe to pluralize a word. Having been driven to contemplate felonies by the sight of signs saying, for example, “DVD’s for sale,” this was enough to win my loyalty. However, Dreyer goes on to explain that in Britain these unnecessary punctuation marks are called “greengrocer’s apostrophes,” because you’re likely to find them on signs […]

“Only godless savages eschew the series comma.”

Dreyer's English by Benjamin Dreyer

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My book club has been focusing on short books lately because we’ve all felt so busy and overwhelmed. A friend of mine chose Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style (2019) for our next book. This book is exactly what you’d think from the title. It might be odd to read a style book for a book club, but we’re a bunch of lawyers who regularly argue about this kind of thing. It was really kind of perfect for us. (Dreyer told me not to use […]

I am a copy editor.

Dreyer's English by Benjamin Dreyer

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This is new explanatory language book about grammar but more so, usage. It’s written and in the audiobook read (to good effect) by Benjamin Dreyer, a copyeditor for Random House and prolific Twitter user. If you don’t know him, you might recall his call for editors to tweet about their specific pet peeves that led to a fun and playfully controversially list a few years back. He begins the book with a set of caveats about how this book is neither authoritative nor exhaustive, explaining […]



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