For Ages
10 to 99

Adapted from the New York Times bestseller by Random House's longtime copy chief, this informative and witty guide to writing and grammar, written especially for a younger audience, entertains as well as instructs.

Full of advice, insider wisdom, and fascinating facts, this book will prove to be invaluable to anyone who wants to be confident in their writing skills, or anyone who enjoys the power of language. Explored throughout are the mysteries of using punctuation, word…

An Excerpt fromDreyer's English (Adapted for Young Readers)

Chapter 1

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (Your Prose) 

Here’s your first challenge:

Go a week without writing the words

• very 

• kind of/sort of

• really

• totally

 

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.” 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.”*

* “Actually” has been a weakness of mine my entire life, speaking and writing, and I realized that it was contagious the first time I heard my two-year-old nephew declare, “Actually, I like peas.”

 

If you can go 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 silent--you will at the end of that week be a considerably…

Under the Cover