Dreyer’s English Review (Benjamin Dreyer)

He’s spent decades fixing other people’s sentences. This is what he learned, and he’s not going to be polite about it.

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Bottom line: Benjamin Dreyer is Random House’s copy chief, which means he has spent more than two decades catching other people’s mistakes and has certain opinions about all that. Dreyer’s English is where those opinions went. It covers punctuation, grammar, word choice, the rules that are genuinely rules, and the rules that are superstitions nobody bothered to retire, and it does all of this with enough wit that you’ll read it straight through rather than leaving it next to your desk to consult when you’re not sure about a semicolon. The limitation is real: this is not a book for writers still working on fundamentals. It assumes you already care about sentences. If you do, it’s the best style guide available, and it isn’t particularly close.

Scribbright rating: 5 out of 5

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The sticking point about style guides?

Most style guides have the personality of a liability waiver. So it’s no wonder that a lot of writers flinch before consulting them. Yes, admit it, you’ve had those moments. Well…I have, at least.

The Elements of Style is the exception, and it compensates for its warmth deficit by being so short you can finish it on a train. On Writing Well is genuinely readable but covers nonfiction specifically and stops at the sentence before it gets to the questions working writers actually argue about. The rest of the genre is reference material: books you own because you’re supposed to and consult grudgingly when a deadline is close and your editor has left a comment that just says “???”

Dreyer’s English is something else. It’s a style guide written by someone who edits for a living at one of the most scrutinized publishing houses on earth, who has strong views, and who decided that explaining those views entertainingly was more useful than presenting them as commandments handed down from a mountain. The result is a book that reads like the best conversation you’ve ever had with a very good editor…assuming you’ve had that conversation, and if you haven’t, this is a more than decent substitute.

→ Grab Dreyer’s English on Amazon

What’s actually in it

The book opens with a chapter on what Dreyer calls “the Wan Intensifiers and Throat Clearers”, the words that litter prose without doing any work. “Very.” “Rather.” “Of course.” “Actually.” He suggests going five weeks without using any of them and seeing what happens to your sentences. He’s right that this works, which is revelatory if you’ve been using “rather” as a crutch for years and assumed nobody noticed.

From there the book moves through punctuation (the semicolon gets the rehabilitation it deserves; the em dash gets complicated; the Oxford comma gets a verdict that is correct), grammar (the rules writers get wrong most often, explained with enough specificity to be useful rather than theoretical), and a long section on usage that is where most of the book’s sharpest judgments live. There’s a chapter called “The Tricky Parts” that covers the questions copyeditors are asked constantly: lay versus lie, who versus whom, that versus which, and so on. And answers them in a way that is both authoritative and, remarkably, funny.

The chapter on proper nouns (names writers routinely get wrong, from spellings to honorifics to how to handle a real living person in a piece of fiction) has no real equivalent in any other style guide and is worth the cover price by itself if you’ve ever had to look up whether it’s “Alec Baldwin” or “Alec Baldwyn” at 11 pm before a deadline. (It’s Baldwin. But you see the point.)

The tone, which is the point

Dreyer writes the way a very good editor talks when he’s not being careful: with opinions, with jokes and the underlying confidence of someone who has read enough bad prose to know exactly what’s wrong with yours. The book has footnotes. The footnotes are funny. This aren’t usually a distinguishing feature of a style guide, and yet here we are.

Writers who want a dry reference work will find this approach bracing. Writers who’ve always found The Elements of Style slightly severe (all those imperatives, no explanation, Strunk in the background somewhere looking disappointed) will find Dreyer’s English a relief. Dreyer doesn’t just tell you what to do. He tells you why, and he tells you what the people who disagree are getting wrong, and occasionally he tells you a story about a manuscript that illustrates the point in a way that is specific enough to be useful and general enough not to get anyone sued.

The audiobook is worth a separate mention. Dreyer narrates it himself, and his delivery is exactly what you’d want: the timing on the jokes is correct, and hearing him read his own examples aloud makes several of them land harder than they do on the page. If you’re going to encounter this book twice (and you probably should) paperback first, audio second is the way to go.

What it doesn’t do

This isn’t a book about structure, narrative, or how to write a paragraph that builds toward something. It’s not a book about nonfiction specifically, or fiction specifically. It won’t help you figure out whether your chapter breaks are in the right places or why your argument keeps losing the reader somewhere in the middle. Those are different books, several of which are reviewed elsewhere on Scribbright.

What it does is make you better at the sentence level. That turns out to be a lot.

How it compares

The Elements of Style is shorter and in places more severe than the underlying evidence warrants. Dreyer is specific about which of Strunk and White’s edicts are still sound and which have been quietly abandoned by everyone who actually edits prose for a living. It’s a distinction that The Elements of Style does not make, because it presents everything with the same unblinking authority, regardless of whether it’s correct. On Writing Well is the better book for nonfiction writers who need structural advice at the essay level. Dreyer’s English is the right guide for anyone who wants to understand the principles behind the decisions rather than just receiving the decisions.

It also notably doesn’t tell you to avoid the passive voice. It tells you when the passive voice is the right choice and when it isn’t, which is a more useful thing to explain.

Who it’s for

Writers who take their sentences seriously want an authority that takes them equally seriously. Editors. Copywriters. Journalists. Anyone who has stared at a sentence and known something was wrong without being able to name it precisely, which describes most people who write for a living, frankly. People who’ve had The Elements of Style on their shelf for years and have always found it slightly inadequate without being able to say why.

Not for: writers still working on fundamentals. Students who need to understand what a clause is before they can worry about whether it needs a comma. Anyone looking for a book that will tell them their instincts are fine and they shouldn’t worry about any of this.

Pros

• Written by someone who does this professionally at the highest level; the authority comes from evidence, not assertion
• Distinguishes between rules that are actually rules and rules that are superstitions, and explains the difference
• Witty enough to read cover to cover; this is not a small achievement for a style guide
• The proper-nouns chapter exists nowhere else and is more useful than it has any right to be
• Audiobook narrated by Dreyer himself; the timing on the jokes is correct
• Takes the correct position on the Oxford comma
• The footnotes are funny

Cons

• Assumes you already care about sentences; not a starter text
• Covers prose style almost exclusively; structural and narrative questions are out of scope
• New York publishing-world references will occasionally feel insider to writers who haven’t spent time in that particular ecosystem
• The wit, while mostly well-calibrated, occasionally delays the point by a sentence or two — which Dreyer himself would probably flag in someone else’s manuscript

The verdict

If someone asked Scribbright which single style guide to buy and there was time for only one answer, this is the answer. It does one thing — teach you how English prose works at the sentence and word level — and it does that thing better than any competing book, with more wit, more specificity, and considerably more honesty about which received wisdom is actually wisdom and which is just received. The fact that it’s also entertaining is almost unfair to the competition.

→ Get Dreyer’s English on Amazon

Michael Semer is a professional writer and editor with 40 years of experience in advertising, B2B content marketing, and digital publishing. He used “rather” as a crutch for approximately thirty of those years and would prefer not to discuss it.

Frequently asked questions

What is Dreyer’s English? A style guide by Benjamin Dreyer, VP and copy chief of Random House, covering word choice, punctuation, grammar, and usage. Dreyer distinguishes between the rules that are genuinely rules and the ones that are superstitions nobody bothered to retire, with explanations of why each falls where it does. It’s unusual in the genre for being authoritative and entertaining enough to read straight through rather than consult reluctantly.

Who is Dreyer’s English for? Writers, editors, journalists, and copywriters who are past the basics and want a serious treatment of prose style from someone who edits it professionally. It’s most useful for people who already care about sentences and want to understand what a very good editor actually looks for. It’s not a starter grammar text.

How does Dreyer’s English compare to The Elements of Style? The Elements of Style is shorter, more severe, and presents all of its rules with the same unblinking authority regardless of whether they’re still current. Dreyer is specific about which of Strunk and White’s edicts hold up and which have been quietly abandoned by working editors, and he explains his reasoning. For most working writers, Dreyer’s English is the more useful book and the more honest one.

Is the audiobook worth it? Yes. Dreyer narrates it himself and the delivery is exactly right — the jokes land the way they’re supposed to, and hearing the examples read aloud clarifies several of them in ways the page doesn’t quite manage. If you’re going to read this book twice, paperback first and audio second is the correct order.

Does Dreyer’s English cover the Oxford comma? It does. Dreyer’s position is correct, and he’s not shy about it.