Between You & Me

Couple of months ago at work, as we were writing a grant proposal, I seemed to interpret a sentence contrary to how everyone else was interpreting it. Eventually, I asked the one person I trust the most in terms of proof-reading - my wife - and she agreed with the others. So I decided I had to up my game and improve what I thought was one of my strengths - writing intelligibly and better reading comprehension. Luckily, I found this book by Mary Norris available to download at our public library.

Yes, she is a copy editor at The New Yorker and yes, her job is just as nerdy as you imagine it to be. Partly a biography and mostly a primer on common writing rules at The New Yorker, she does get into the weeds on some aspects of grammar. There are entire chapters devoted to just one punctuation mark and as the title suggests, she also busts several myths on what people consider correct grammar (It is Between You & Me and not Between You & I). She even has traced the origins of a hyphen. To be fair, it was a famous one. Did you know, Moby Dick is used to refer to the whale but Moby-Dick is used to refer to the book? Well, now you do. The books out there without the hyphen have it wrong; at least according to the copy editor who inserted the hyphen after Melville wrote it.

It can be a dense and at time boring read especially at 11pm but for some crazy people like me, it can be captivating. However, the downside is that, now I find myself doubting myself each time I use a comma or a semi-colon and I'm sure Mary would mark up this review in her favorite No.1 pencil if she could. So don't judge me just yet. I've tons to learn.

Norris's writing is charming, witty, and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny, but even she couldn't make the deeper dives into grammar interesting for me. I hate grammar, but someone who is interested in or loves grammar would certainly enjoy this book.

I can't decide if Mary Norris has the best job in the world or the worst job in the world. What would it be like to spend your life (more than thirty years of it) working in the copy room of The New Yorker, agonizing over whether to hyphenate a word or add a comma? Part of the fun is the who; Norris isn't checking spelling and firming up sloppy writing for seventh-graders, after all, but for the likes of some of our world's greatest writers. Part of the fun is also the puzzling through the sometimes contradictory rules, and reflecting on The New Yorker's stylish grammar choices amid the contradictions (always doubling the final consonant before adding a suffix, for example...interesting).