47:365 | Dreyer’s English

I was excited to open my copy of Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style on my Kindle app last night. Billed as a guide:

“Chockful of advice, insider wisdom, and fun facts, this book will prove to be invaluable to everyone who wants to shore up their writing skills, mandatory for people who spend their time editing and shaping other people’s prose, and—perhaps best of all—an utter treat for anyone who simply revels in language.”

However, after making my way through much of the book, the advice and tips aren’t for me. I’m all for finding ways to make my writing more understandable and enjoyable for others to read, but I found much of the guidance to produce meandering, cluttered, and run-on sentences. For example, Dreyer notes on p. 62, “Likely you don’t need much advice from me on how to use em dashes, because you all seem to use an awful lot of them. They’re useful for interruption of dialogue, either midsentence from within … or to convey interruption from without.”

However, I found this use of dashes, including the way they are used throughout this book, to be a lazy writing practice that makes the reader do far too much work to understand the author’s thought. I almost closed my Kindle on reading this sentence on the book’s first page, “And you can toss in—or, that is, toss out—“just” (not in the sense of “righteous” but in the sense of “merely”) and “so” (in the “extremely” sense, though as conjunctions go it’s pretty disposable too).

While I may try out some of the tips, my take is this book is written for those who write for a less formal purpose and audience. My writing/editing tends to be either for academic publications or for instructional message delivery where clarity is paramount. Bending (to the point of breaking) grammar and punctuation rules may have a place, but not for my purposes.