The stuff on my shelf

[bloodygranuaile]

For some inexplicable reason I agreed to give a presentation on technical editing at work, which immediately ran into a number of issues such as “I hate using PowerPoint” and “I am incapable of doing public speaking seriously” and “The only public speakings I have done in years have been about socialism so God knows what jokes I’ll end up making if I don’t plan them out in advance, or even if I do.” But anyway, I did it, and in preparation I started finally poking about a bit more in my pile o’ editing books that I had rather meant to start reading during unemployment so I didn’t lose all my professional skills but hadn’t touched because I wound up spending all of my unemployment time doing socialism instead. Anyway, the first one I picked up and began reading properly was Benjamin Dreyer’s Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, which I had picked up at an ACES conference when it was first published two years ago. Dreyer’s English kicks off with a Marie Kondo joke, which seemed to me a good sign; I included three Marie Kondo jokes in my own presentation, so it’s nice to be in illustrious company, although it is possible that I overdid it.

 

One thing that makes Dreyer’s English (and Dreyer’s Twitter feed, for that matter) so fun is that, while he certainly can be on the fussily correct side at times--as most people who go into editorial work are, at least on some things--the man has absolutely no patience for boring grammatical terminology, or indeed boring terminology of any sort (I suspect he’d hate my job). Sometimes he uses amusingly fancy words for things and other times he uses amusingly plain ones; the book itself is divided into two main sections, casually titled “The Stuff in the Front” and “The Stuff in the Back.” This is a register increasingly common among extremely online word nerds who are particularly vested in busting the image of word nerd types as humorless scolds with narrow, context-free views of “correct” English; I’m not sure anyone has yet beaten Kory Stamper’s Word by Word for sheer joy of language yet. That book remains the gold standard by which all self-deprecating word nerdery is judged. This one comes close, though; even when Dreyer is fussy in ways I might disagree with (lots of perfectly normal people eschew the series comma, or at least as normal as you get in journalism), it’s in a self-aware good humor rather than actual scolding (later, he gives a tip that if you’re writing fake newspaper articles in your novel, you should cut the series commas from the fake newspaper clippings for instant verisimilitude). 

 

Because this book is so funny and readable it’s going near the top of my list for books to recommend to people who ordinarily wouldn’t be real big on reading big fat stylebooks or professional development resources for editorial types, but who might just want to spiff up their writing a little bit. However, I also definitely recommend it for editorial types, no matter how many big fat stylebooks you already have, simply because it is so delightful and doesn’t make you try to remember what a restrictive clause is.