Pun Salad

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you "The Flannery O'Connor Flowchart" from page 13:

You get the idea. This book is a compendium of advice on how to improve your writing, in order that people like the author, Benjamin Dreyer, won't have to wince and fix it before publication. He is currently "vice president, executive managing editor and copy chief, of Random House," but he started out as a proofreader/copy editor, and he knows his stuff. And he's sharing his accumulated suggestions/demands with a great deal of humor and insight.

Example (page 65):

Go light on the exclamation points. When overused, they're bossy, hectoring, and, ultimately, wearying. Some writers recommend that you should use no more than a dozen exclamation points per book; others insist that you should use no more than a dozen exclamation points in a lifetime.

And you red-blooded Americans will want to peruse the section starting on page 77: "How Not To Write Like a Brit".

If you write anything, you'll probably benefit from Dreyer's guidance. Even if your literary output is confined to your yearly one-page Christmas letter. And you'll have a lot of fun and pick up odd and interesting facts along the way. (What's "the rhetorical trick of referring to something by denying that you're referring to it"? That would be "apophasis".)

Dreyer's general good humor is only occasionally marred by gratuitous political shots. (OK, Ben, we get it: you're a Democrat.) They are easy to forgive, after an eye-roll. (Um, should I have hyphenated that?)

Random Observation 1: The humor extends to the book cover. Did you notice?

Random Observation 2: I have never seen an "Acknowledgments" section so long and detailed. Eight pages. Dreyer's very grateful to (roughly) every one he's ever met. I don't think my name's in there, but I could of have missed it.

Random Observation 3: Dreyer's section on lay/lie/laid/etc. is exhaustive and exhausting. You think you know the rules? Don't be so sure about that.

Irrelevant observation: when I grabbed this off the shelf at the Portsmouth Public Library, I noticed they had tons of tomes with roughly the same Dewey Decimal numbers. There must be a lot of aspiring or actual writers among the PPL clientele, demanding tutelage.