A Highly Opinionated Guide to Better Writing

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Benjamin Dreyer is vice president, executive managing editor, and copy chief for Random House.

And now he is the author of a highly opinionated book about language called Dreyer’s English, an utterly correct guide to clarity and style, which kind of gives you a sense of the tone right there.

He’s being ironic, right?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes, and one of the things he does is to challenge readers to go a whole week without writing the following words: very, rather, really, quite, actually, surely, just in the sense of merely, so in the sense of extremely, and pretty, as in pretty pedantic.

And he also throws in the phrases, of course, and in fact, and that said.

And he says, if you can purge from your prose what he calls these wand intensifiers and throat clearers, then you will, at the end of that week, be a considerably better writer than you were at the beginning.

So I thought, you know, I’ve heard that kind of advice before, but he was so emphatic about it that I thought,

Well, I’m going to try that with my own writing.

How long do you last?

An hour?

Very good question, because it was rough.

And so what I decided to do was every time I caught myself using a just or an actually.

These wan intensifiers.

What a great way to put it.

Yes.

I made a promise to myself that any time I used one of those, I would get up from my desk and do a couple of squats.

Because, you know, they say that squats are one of the best exercises you can do, especially as you grow older.

So I have Benjamin Dreyer to thank for having really strong thighs.

Joining the American national rugby team.

And he was right.

It was kind of painful to start excising those because I use them all the time.

We sure do, don’t we?

But boy, it really makes a difference.

I’ve got a few that I’ve worked on actually because it tends to preface things where you’re correcting someone.

Right.

Well, actually.

And even when you use it in a way that’s not correcting someone, they can take it that way.

Right.

So you’ve got to disempower it and just remove it.

Right.

Right.

And so he’s not too tough on people in speech, but in writing, it really makes a difference.

So Benjamin Dreyer, as a copy editor and language expert working for Random House, kind of has put 30 years of expertise in the single book.

What is it called again?

It’s called Dreyer’s English, An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style.

And yes, he’s distilled almost 30 years of copy editing experience, but he’s also distilled his own personality.

I think that’s what really makes that.

That’s the only way to do it, right?

Nobody wants some finger-wagging supposed expert, right?

Right, right.

So there’s a lot of snark and a lot of shade and a lot of verve.

It’s just a really fun book if you love language, as we do.

Snark and shade and verve.

So what do you say we share some more book recommendations later in the show?

Well, you know, I got piles of them.

I know you do.

I’ll pick out a couple.

We’ll see what we can do.

Okay.

And in the meantime, we’d love to hear from you about your favorite books,

Language or not 877-929-9673 or send an email to words at waywardreader.org.

And we will try to share them on future shows.