CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: By Way of Introduction xi part i The Stuff in the Front 1 chapter 1 The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (Your Prose) 3 chapter 2 Rules and Nonrules 6 chapter 3 67 Assorted Things to Do (and Not to Do) with Punctuation 20 chapter 4 1, 2, 3, Go: The Treatment of Numbers 67 chapter 5 Foreign Affairs 74 chapter 6 A Little Grammar Is a Dangerous Thing 84 chapter 7 The Realities of Fiction 102 part ii The Stuff in the Back 127 chapter 8 Notes on, Amid a List of, Frequently and/or Easily Misspelled Words 129 chapter 9 Peeves and Crotchets 147 chapter 10 The Confusables 166 chapter 11 Notes on Proper Nouns 210 x chapter 12 The Trimmables 242 chapter 13 The Miscellany 252 OUTRO: By Way of Conclusion 267 THINGS I LIKE 269 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 271 INDEX 279 Chapter 1 The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (Your Prose) Here''s your first challenge: Go a week without writing * very * rather * really * quite * in fact 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). Oh yes: "pretty." As in "pretty tedious." Or "pretty pedantic." Go ahead and kill that particular darling. And "of course." That''s right out. And "surely.

" And "that said." And "actually"? Feel free to go the rest of your life without another "actually." If you can last a week without writing any of what I''ve come to think of as the Wan Intensifiers and Throat Clearers--I wouldn''t ask you to go a week without saying them; that would render most people, especially British people, mute--you will at the end of that week be a considerably better writer than you were at the beginning. Clarification No. 1 Well, OK, go ahead and write them--I don''t want you tripping over your own pencil every time you compose a sentence--but, having written them, go back and dispose of them. Every single one. No, don''t leave that last one intact just because it looks cute and helpless. And if you feel that what''s left is somehow missing something, figure out a better, stronger, more effective way to make your point.

Clarification No. 2 Before you get all overwrought and but-but-but, I''m not saying never use them--go count the "very"s in this book. I''m merely asking you to skip them for a week. A single measly little week. Now, as a show of good faith, and to demonstrate that even the most self-indulgent of us can and should every now and then summon up a little fortitude, I hereby pledge that this is the last time you''ll see the word "actually" in this book. For your own part, if you can abstain from these twelve terms for a week, and if you read not a single additional word of this book--if you don''t so much as peek at the next page--I''ll be content. Well, no. But it sounded good.

Chapter 2 Rules and Nonrules I have nothing against rules. They''re indispensable when playing Monopoly or gin rummy, and their observance can go a long way toward improving a ride on the subway. The rule of law? Big fan. The English language, though, is not so easily ruled and regulated. It developed without codification, sucking up new constructions and vocabulary every time some foreigner set foot on the British Isles--to say nothing of the mischief we Americans have wreaked on it these last few centuries--and continues to evolve anarchically. It has, to my great dismay, no enforceable laws, much less someone to enforce the laws it doesn''t have. Certain prose rules are essentially inarguable--that a sentence''s subject and its verb should agree in number, for instance. Or that in a "not only x but y" construction, the x and the y must be parallel elements.

(More on this in Chapter 6: A Little Grammar Is a Dangerous Thing.) Why? I suppose because they''re firmly entrenched, because no one cares to argue with them, and because they aid us in using our words to their preeminent purpose: to communicate clearly with our readers. Let''s call these reasons the Four C''s, shall we? Convention. Consensus. Clarity. Comprehension. Also simply because, I swear to you, a well-constructed sentence sounds better. Literally sounds better.

One of the best ways to determine whether your prose is well-constructed is to read it aloud. A sentence that can''t be readily voiced is a sentence that likely needs to be rewritten. A good sentence, I find myself saying frequently, is one that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter how long it is, without having to double back in confusion because the writer misused or omitted a key piece of punctuation, chose a vague or misleading pronoun, or in some other way engaged in inadvertent misdirection. (If you want to puzzle your reader, that''s your own business.) As much as I like a good rule, I''m an enthusiastic subscriber to the notion of "rules are meant to be broken"--once you''ve learned them, I hasten to add. But let''s, right now, attend to a few of what I think of as the Great Nonrules of the English Language. You''ve encountered all of these; likely you were taught them in school. I''d like you to free yourself of them.

They''re not helping you; all they''re doing is clogging your brain and inciting you to look self-consciously over your own shoulder as you write, which is as psychically painful as it is physically impossible. And once you''ve done that, once you''ve gotten rid of them, hopefully you can put your attention on vastly more important things. Why are they nonrules? So far as I''m concerned, because they''re largely unhelpful, pointlessly constricting, feckless, and useless. Also because they''re generally of dubious origin: devised out of thin air, then passed on till they''ve gained respectable solidity and, ultimately, have ossified. Language experts far more expert than I have, over the years, done their best to debunk them, yet these made-up strictures refuse to go away and have proven more durable than Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. Put together. Part of the problem, I must add, is that some of them were made up by ostensible and presumably well-meaning language experts in the first place, so getting rid of them can be a bit like trying to get a dog to stop chasing its own tail. I''ll dispatch these reasonably succinctly, with the hope that you''ll trust that I''ve done my homework and will be happy to see them go.

I''m mindful of Gertrude Stein''s characterization of Ezra Pound as "a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not," and no one wants to be that guy. Also, if you persist in insisting that these nonrules are real and valid and to be hewed to, all the expert citations in the world won''t, I know through experience, change your mind one tiny little bit. An admission: Quite a lot of what I do as a copy editor is to help writers avoid being carped at, fairly or--and this is the part that hurts--unfairly, by People Who Think They Know Better and Write Aggrieved Emails to Publishing Houses. Thus I tend to be a bit conservative about flouting rules that may be a bit dubious in their origin but, observed, ain''t hurting nobody. And though the nonrules below are particularly arrant nonsense, I warn you that, in breaking them, you''ll have a certain percentage of the reading and online-commenting populace up your fundament to tell you you''re subliterate. Go ahead and break them anyway. It''s fun, and I''ll back you up. The Big Three 1.

Never Begin a Sentence with "And" or "But." No, do begin a sentence with "And" or "But," if it strikes your fancy to do so. Great writers do it all the time. As do even not necessarily great writers, like the person who has, so far in this book, done it a few times and intends to do it a lot more. But soft, as they used to say, here comes a caveat: An "And" or a "But" (or a "For" or an "Or" or a "However" or a "Because," to cite four other sentence starters one is often warned against) is not always the strongest beginning for a sentence, and making a relentless habit of using any of them palls quickly. You may find that you don''t need that "And" at all. You may find that your "And" or "But" sentence might easily attach to its predecessor sentence with either a comma or a semicolon. Take a good look, and give it a good think.

Let''s test an example or two. Francie, of course, became an outsider shunned by all because of her stench. But she had become accustomed to being lonely. Francie, of course, became an outsider shunned by all because of her stench, but she had become accustomed to being lonely. Which do you think Betty Smith, the author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, chose? The former, as it happens. Had I been Smith''s copy editor, I might well have suggested the second, to make one coherent, connected thought out of two unnecessarily separated ones. Perhaps she''d have agreed, or perhaps she''d have preferred the text as she''d written it, hearing it in her head as a solemn knell. Authors do often prefer their text the way they''ve written it.

Here''s another, in two flavors: In the hospital he should be safe, for Major Callendar would protect him, but the Major had not come, and now things were worse than ever. In the hospit.