Nova: Go a full week without using the words "very," "rather," "really," "quite," or "just." That's the opening challenge Benjamin Dreyer throws at his readers in the opening pages of Dreyer's English. And honestly, Leo, the first time I tried it, I nearly broke down by lunchtime.

Nova: A person who has spent nearly three decades as the copy chief of Random House, polishing the prose of authors like Michael Chabon and Elizabeth Strout. Benjamin Dreyer is essentially the guardian angel, or perhaps the friendly ghost, who has haunted the margins of countless bestsellers, wielding a pencil and a sensibility that is as witty as it is exacting. His book, Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, came out in 2019 and somehow did the impossible: it made a grammar and style guide into a New York Times bestseller.

Nova: It does, and yet it's true. Dreyer's English is less a rulebook and more a conversation with a brilliant, deeply funny friend who happens to know everything about the semicolon. The New Yorker called it a book that possesses a "hedonic appeal" — meaning reading it feels good. The Guardian praised its accuracy and style. And here's the thing: Dreyer's central argument is that most of the rigid grammar rules you learned in school are not rules at all. They're superstitions, passed down like old wives' tales, and they're getting in the way of strong, clear writing.

Nova: Precisely. And today we're going to explore what Dreyer calls the Great Nonrules, his surprisingly collaborative philosophy of editing, and why the ultimate test of any sentence is simply reading it aloud. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Nova.

Nova: So let's start with that opening challenge, because it really is the gateway into Dreyer's whole philosophy. The first chapter is called "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up," and it's a direct nod to Marie Kondo's decluttering method. Dreyer asks you to go a week without using what he calls the "wan intensifiers": very, rather, really, quite, in fact, just, so, pretty, of course, surely, that said, and — he saves special venom for this one — actually.

Nova: Dreyer's argument is that these words don't intensify anything — they weaken it. When you say someone is "very smart," you're using two words to do the work of one. Just say they're brilliant. "Very hungry" becomes ravenous. "Very tired" becomes exhausted. These filler words, Dreyer says, are like verbal throat-clearing. They add noise without adding meaning. In his NPR interview, he called them "wan intensifiers" — they're pale, they're weak, and they're usually just padding.

Nova: That's a fair point, and Dreyer actually concedes this. In a footnote — and this book has some of the best footnotes you'll ever read — he says he's not asking you to delete these words forever. He's asking you to become conscious of them. Once you start noticing how often you reach for "very" or "just," you start asking whether the sentence is stronger without them. And almost always, it is.

Nova: Exactly. And he extends this tidying principle to what he calls "redundant words" — phrases where one word is already doing the work of another. "Close proximity" — proximity already means closeness. "End result" — a result is already the end. "Past history" — all history is past. "Plan ahead" — you can't plan behind. "General consensus" — consensus is general by definition. Once you see these redundancies, you can't unsee them.

Nova: You and the entire English-speaking world. Dreyer's point is that this kind of clutter accumulates in prose the way clutter accumulates in a house. You don't notice it until you actively go looking for it. And when you clear it out, your sentences suddenly have room to breathe.

Nova: Leo, let me ask you something. Were you ever told in school that you can't start a sentence with "And" or "But"?

Nova: Well, Dreyer wants you to know that this is what he calls a "Great Nonrule" — something that was essentially made up, passed along until it ossified into fake authority, and now sits in our brains like an uninvited houseguest. He devotes a whole chapter to what he calls "Rules and Nonrules," and the Big Three are: never begin a sentence with "And" or "But," never split an infinitive, and never end a sentence with a preposition.

Nova: Exactly. Dreyer's response to all three is essentially: great writers do it all the time, and they do it because it sounds better. He quotes E. M. Forster in A Passage to India, where Forster uses a sentence-starting "But" after a period precisely because the period creates a dramatic pause that a comma can't deliver. As Dreyer puts it: a well-constructed sentence literally sounds better. And on splitting infinitives, he invokes Star Trek — "To boldly go where no man has gone before" — and points out that "Boldly to go" or "To go boldly" just don't have the same ring.

Nova: Dreyer traces some of them back to specific, now-forgotten grammarians. The rule against splitting infinitives, for example, seems to have gained traction from a nineteenth-century textual critic named Henry Alford — whom Dreyer wryly notes no one wants to read about. The rule against ending with a preposition came from an attempt to make English behave like Latin, where prepositions genuinely can't end sentences. But English isn't Latin, and trying to force it into Latin's clothes was always a doomed project.

Nova: Far from it. He's very clear that some rules are non-negotiable: subject-verb agreement, parallel construction, the proper use of punctuation for clarity. His test is whether a rule actually helps the reader understand what you're saying. He calls this the Four C's: Convention, Consensus, Clarity, and Comprehension. If a rule doesn't serve those — like "never split an infinitive" — it belongs in the dustbin. But if it does — like the serial comma, which he defends with the unforgettable line "Only godless savages eschew the series comma" — then you should follow it.

Nova: That's the one. And for Dreyer, it's not negotiable. His argument is that the serial comma almost always adds clarity and its absence almost always invites ambiguity. He tells the classic joke about the book dedication: "To my parents, Ayn Rand and God." Without the serial comma, it sounds like Ayn Rand and God are the author's parents. With it — "To my parents, Ayn Rand, and God" — sanity is restored.

Nova: One of the most surprising things about Dreyer's English is how humble it is. Here's a man who spent nearly thirty years as the final authority on grammar and style for one of the biggest publishing houses in the world. You might expect him to be a ferocious gatekeeper. And yet his philosophy of copy editing is almost the opposite of that.

Nova: Dreyer describes the copy editor's job as helping a manuscript become "even more like itself than it was when I got to work on it." Not to impose a house style, not to pound prose into submission, but to listen carefully to what the writer is doing and enhance it. He compares it to a really thorough teeth cleaning — you're removing what doesn't belong, but the smile is still the author's.

Nova: Oh, Dreyer has stories. In the book, he mentions — anonymously — one author who responded to copy edits by scrawling "It's called style" in the margin. And another who simply wrote in red ink: "WRITE YOUR OWN FUCKING BOOK."

Nova: Well, he did write his own book. But his point is that the best copy editor-author relationships are genuine collaborations. In his NPR interview, he said that a good acceptance rate for a copy editor's suggestions is about 85 percent. If an author says yes to everything, Dreyer actually feels a little hurt — it suggests they weren't engaged enough to argue. He wants the push and pull. He wants authors to say, "Funny thing, I actually like it the way I wrote it."

Nova: Exactly. And this extends to his advice about choosing your battles. In the book, he recommends that if you're someone who cares deeply about language — and if you're reading this book, you probably are — you should pick maybe six things to be ridiculously stubborn about, not dozens. As he told NPR: "You have to choose your irrational battles." Otherwise, you become unbearable to everyone around you, and you probably drive yourself crazy too.

Nova: Based on the book, the serial comma is definitely one. He's also pretty militant about "actually" — he says it serves no purpose except to irritate. He's a stickler for the difference between "lie" and "lay." He insists that "literally" should not be used as a mere intensifier, though The Guardian review rightly pointed out that this is a battle he's probably lost, given that "literally" has been used figuratively for at least 250 years. And he has strong feelings about the proper use of italics, semicolons, and the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses. But the meta-lesson is that even his strongest opinions come with a wink — he knows he's being a little ridiculous, and he invites you to be a little ridiculous too.

Nova: Leo, let's talk about one of Dreyer's most delightful teaching tools. He has a trick for identifying the passive voice that I have never been able to forget. Are you ready?

Nova: If you can append the phrase "by zombies" to the end of a sentence, and it still makes grammatical sense, you've written a sentence in the passive voice.

Nova: You've got it. The zombie test is brilliant because it makes visible something that most people find confusing and abstract. And here's where Dreyer departs from most writing advice: he does not tell you to eliminate the passive voice. He tells you to understand it and use it when it serves your purpose.

Nova: And Dreyer would say that's lazy advice. He gives an example from a novel where the sentence is: "The floors were swept, the beds made, the rooms aired out." That's all passive, but it's beautiful. The point of interest is the state of the house, not who did the sweeping. If you forced it into the active voice — "Someone swept the floors, someone made the beds, someone aired out the rooms" — you'd ruin the rhythm and shift the focus entirely.

Nova: Precisely. And this connects to Dreyer's larger point about what makes a good sentence. His definition is one of the most quoted lines from the book: "A good sentence is one that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter how long it is, without having to double back in confusion." Notice he doesn't say a good sentence is short. He doesn't say it follows a particular structure. He says it's clear — it leads the reader forward without ambush. That's the only real test.

Nova: You read it aloud. This is Dreyer's single most emphasized piece of advice, and he returns to it again and again. Your ear catches what your eye misses. A sentence that can't be readily voiced is a sentence that likely needs to be rewritten. He compares it to comedy — you want the punchline at the end, not buried in the middle. If a sentence dribbles off weakly, try reordering its elements so the strong word lands at the finish.

Nova: That's exactly the spirit of the book. Dreyer talks about punctuation as rhythm — commas are breaths, periods are stops, semicolons are a kind of poised pause. He even quotes, at length, the opening paragraph of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, which uses semicolons to create what he calls "tightly woven, almost claustrophobic ideas, a paragraph that grabs you by the hand." He's not just teaching rules — he's teaching you to hear language.

Nova: The New Yorker published a review of Dreyer's English with a fascinating framework. The critic, Katy Waldman, argued that Dreyer doesn't convince you to follow his rules through authority or logic — he convinces you through pleasure. She called it the "hedonic appeal."

Nova: Exactly. His book is full of sentences that just feel delicious. He describes hyphenated vulgarities as "comically dainty." He says parentheses have a "conveyance of elbow-nudging joshingness." He observes that novels can "shimmy." He talks about ending a question-shaped sentence with a period and notes, with obvious delight: "It makes a statement, doesn't it." The period at the end of that sentence is itself the punchline.

Nova: It really is. And Waldman contrasts this with the approach of earlier usage guides. Strunk and White's Elements of Style relied on the music of its own prose. Bryan Garner's Dictionary of Modern American Usage, which David Foster Wallace famously championed, relied on what Wallace called an "Ethical Appeal" — a complex and sophisticated "Trust me." But Dreyer's approach is different. He's saying: follow these rules not because I told you to, not because they're correct, but because your sentences will taste better.

Nova: He does, but always with a self-aware wink. The chapter called "Peeves and Crotchets" is essentially Dreyer airing his personal grievances with the English language, and he knows it. He doesn't like "literally" used as an intensifier. He doesn't like "begs the question" used to mean "raises the question." He has strong opinions about "lie" versus "lay." But the Guardian review points out that some of his peeves are questionable — for instance, he takes a swipe at Alanis Morissette's song "Ironic," claiming rain on your wedding day isn't irony. But as the reviewer notes, situational irony is absolutely a thing, and Dreyer is probably wrong about that one.

Nova: And that's part of the charm. The book isn't pretending to be infallible. It's one person's hard-won wisdom, offered with humor and humility. The subtitle is "An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style," but that "utterly correct" is clearly tongue-in-cheek. Dreyer knows that language is too wild and too alive to be utterly corralled by anyone. As he writes in The Paris Review: "The English language 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."

Nova: That's his vision exactly. And it's why the through line of the book is that there are fewer absolutes in writing than you might think. Every rule has exceptions. Every choice is contextual. The goal isn't correctness for its own sake — it's clarity, it's rhythm, it's the reader's experience. That's what makes a sentence good.

Nova: So, Leo, after spending time with Dreyer's English, what sticks with you most?

Nova: That's a beautiful way to put it. And I think that tension — between freedom and discipline — is exactly what Dreyer is after. He wants you to know the rules so you can break them intelligently. He wants you to care about language without becoming a pedant. He wants your sentences to be clear, strong, and pleasurable to read.

Nova: Here it is: Go one week without using "very," "rather," "really," "quite," or "just." Just try it. Notice how often you reach for them, and notice what happens when you don't. Dreyer promises that you'll be a considerably better writer at the end of the week than you were at the beginning. And the wonderful thing is — he's probably right.

Nova: Exactly. Dreyer's English reminds us that writing is a physical act — it's breath and rhythm and sound. Good prose has a pulse. And the best writing advice in the world might just be: listen to the music.