Benjamin Dreyer > Quotes

“Only godless savages eschew the series comma.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“He implied without saying."
...I scarcely had the heart to cross out "without quite saying" and to note in the margin, politely and succinctly, "”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“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

“It has, to my great dismay, no enforceable laws, much less someone to enforce the laws it doesn’t have.*1”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“Or to advertent comic effect, if you’re Groucho Marx: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I’ll never know.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“Neither will we discuss the interrobang, because we’re all civilized adults here.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.*30”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“There’s nothing to be gained by referring to the playwright Tennessee Williams as “the famous playwright Tennessee Williams.” If a person is famous enough to be referred to as famous, there’s no need to refer to that person as famous, is there. Neither is there much to be gained by referring to “the late Tennessee Williams,” much less “the late, great Tennessee Williams,” which is some major cheese. I’m occasionally asked how long a dead person is appropriately late rather than just plain dead. I don’t know, and apparently neither does anyone else.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“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

“think of this as the “Jane Austen Did It So It Must Be OK” school of wordsmithery, but it’s not a school I attend. I don’t punctuate like Jane Austen; I feel no compunction to otherwise English like Jane Austen. If our infinitely malleable language gains in expansion, invention, and reinvention, it can also, for the sake of precision and clarity, benefit from occasionally having its screws tightened, and not every centuries-old definition need be retained when a word has, over time, accumulated more meanings than are perhaps useful.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“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

“LAGUARDIA AIRPORT Hellhole.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“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

“Footnote pop quiz: Why, then, would I hyphenate the likes of “scholarly-looking teenagers” or “lovely-smelling flowers”? Because not all “-ly” words are adverbs. Sometimes they’re adjectives. Really, I’m sorry.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“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

“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

“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

“The English alphabet is comprised of twenty-six letters.” Cue the sirens, because here come the grammar cops. Use plain “comprise” to mean “made up of” and you’re on safe ground. But as soon as you’re about to attach the word “of” to the word “comprise,” raise your hands to the sky and edit yourself. Once you’ve lowered your hands.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“All this said, there’s nothing wrong with sentences constructed in the passive voice – you’re simply choosing where you want to put the sentence’s emphasis – and I see nothing objectionable in, say, The floors were swept, the beds made, the rooms aired out. Since the point of interest is the cleanness of the house and not the identity of the cleaner. But many a sentence can be improved by putting its true protagonist at the beginning, so that’s something to be considered.fn10”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style: The UK Edition

“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

“I now have a colleague whose pronoun of choice is “they,” and thus the issue is no longer culturally abstract but face-to-face personal, no longer an issue I’d persuaded myself was none of my business but one of basic human respect I chose—choose—to embrace. (I’m happy to call myself out for stubbornly avoiding the topic till it became personal. One is supposed to be better than that; one often isn’t.)”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style