Dreyer's English-Benjamin Dreyer

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

Benjamin Dreyer

 

 

‘Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand’. George Orwell wrote in his essay, Politics and the English Language.

 

‘Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.’ Said Gustave Flaubert.

 

Writing is a tiring activity. Effort to transform a mental picture into words is severely draining. If you do not have formal training in a language, I mean specifically English in my case, but read obsessively, and hence feel in your guts how your writing should look on paper, the struggle to write is frustrating. The right word never occurs without fiercely shaking your head, if it occurs at all. Sentence looks deformed like a coalition government. Its meaning is obscure even to you, when read after a few minutes. You tinker, you putter, you throw the pen and bang the note book shut, you curse yourself for being so daft, you open the notebook again as the word you had in mind suddenly pops up, you heave a sigh of relief when you notice that jottings on the paper occupy a respectable length, and you decide that your day’s work is done. On reading the completed piece, if you feel the words reflect what you had set out to convey, your chest swells up with joy. For, writing is a most satisfying exercise too.

 

For long I believed that good writing was an innate skill. When an idea seized a writer, all he had to do was sit down with a pen and a notebook and keep writing till his fingers ached. My first encounter with an author’s account of the process of writing, was in a Somerset Maugham book. I had by then read many or perhaps most of his books. I liked his prose as immensely as I liked his terse plots, crisp dialogues and the piquant twists in his character’s behaviour. A sixth sense told me that his prose was different from most authors I’d read till then, but I could not discern the characteristics that so enchanted me. Then I read the piece on writing in one of his books. He believed that qualities most important in good prose, in the order of preference, are; simplicity, lucidity and euphony. I now understood why I had found his prose irresistibly luring. And I looked for these qualities in the books I read, fiction or non-fiction. I found most good writings have these qualities, though in varying proportions. But to incorporate these qualities in your writing is an extremely arduous task. Books on writing style would be godsent for one who wants to say clearly what he has in mind, but has no formal training in language. I don’t have ability and patience to read, understand, and practice strict rules of grammar now. Thus, I’m perpetually on a lookout for books that dole out advice on writing simply, lucidly and without sounding like a workshop of a grammarian martinet. I chanced upon Dreyer’s English recently.

 

Benjamin Dreyer, author of the book, is the Copy Chief at Random House. After a piece of writing is complete and has been revised by the author and the editor, it lends on his desk. His job it to, ‘lay my hands on that piece of writing and make it…better, cleaner, clearer. More efficient…’. His job thus, amply qualifies him to advise us on some basic rules for writing. Book is extremely well written. It offers hordes of easily graspable tips on writing. And all is enveloped in a tremendously humorous prose of Dreyer. This is one problem as you read the book. Every sentence teems with information that will be of great use and should be imbibed with patience. But Dreyer writes so well, that you read the book like a skilfully told story.

 

Dreyer offers his opinion and tips on writing without sounding pedantic. Yet his advice is authoritative. He is amusing throughout. His seemingly light-hearted banter hides kernel of ‘essential-writing-skills’ underneath. He begins most simply by listing words one should diligently weed out from their writing. These are most abused words like: very, rather, really, quite, in fact, etc. He asks us to go without these for a week to begin. He would like that we eschew them in speech too, though, ‘I wouldn’t ask you to go a week without saying them: that would render most people, especially British people, mute’. He has his opinionated advice on why and when some rules can be flouted without scruples, like: never begin a sentence with ‘And’ or ‘But’; never split an infinitive; the passive voice is to be avoided; and so forth. He tells us about ‘67 assorted things to do (and not to do) with punctuation’. He offers some acutely needed tips on periods, commas, colons, semicolons, etc. He exhorts us to follow rules of punctuation assiduously, to make our prose not only neat but also of unambiguous import. ‘What goes up must come down, and that which commences with a comma if it is an interruption, must also end with one…’, he advices in a section on comma. He comments on certain peculiar issues in writing of fiction, he came across in his profession as a copy editor. He devotes a chapter to spellings and one to irritating usages of words. His essay on ‘Confusables’, i.e., wrong usage of words, is one of the best in the book. It’s wit, it’s sagacious advice and its vast utility, make it a most delightful read. ‘The Trimmable’, another similar topic, where Dreyer offers his opinion on redundancies in writing, ‘two words where one will do’, is another gem in a well-adorned book.

 

I cannot say, I did not rush through the pages, as the book is so easy on eyes and mind- though being aware all the time that I will have to return to it many times, to benefit from the treasure it offers. I intend to do this sincerely. This book must occupy a space on your writing desk, where reside your most referred Dictionary and Thesaurus.

 

Dec 2019