Writers read! And here is one of our By the Bay 2 authors' favorite book of 2016.
Book Title: Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
Author: Mary Norris
Genre: This book fits in many genres: Nonfiction, memoir, language/writing, humor, and reference.
Setting:
Format:
Pages: 240
Publication date: April 6, 2015
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Opening Lines: “Let’s get one thing straight right from the beginning: I didn’t set out to be a comma queen. The first job I ever had, the summer I was fifteen, was checking feet at a public pool in Cleveland. I was a “key girl”—“Key personnel” was the job title on my pay stub (I made seventy-five dollars a week). I never knew what that was supposed to mean. I was not in charge of any keys, and my position was by no means crucial to the operation of the pool, although I did clean the bathrooms.”
Favorite Passage: “The Oxford comma refers to the Oxford University Press, whose house style is to use the serial comma. (The public-relations department at Oxford doesn’t use it, however. Presumably PR people see it as a waste of time and space. The business end of these operations is always in a hurry and does not approve of clutter. The serial comma is a pawn in the war between town and gown.) To call it the Oxford comma gives it a bit of class, a little snob appeal. Kids use it (or, rather, “reference” it) on their Twitter bios and their match.com profiles to show that they have standards. Chances are that if you use the Oxford comma you brush the crumbs off your shirtfront before going out. The British get to have it both ways: they deride us Americans for our allegiance to a comma that they named and then rejected as pretentious.”
Review: To be successful, writers must write well. I have always been fascinated by grammar, punctuation, and usage rules, and I have many dry reference books on my bookshelf. When I first stumbled across Between You & Me, I was immediately captured by the humorous description of the author's own experiences in the copy department at The New Yorker, her use of historical examples, and the way she snuck rules on writing into stories and anecdotes. I quickly realized this was not a dry reference book—it was a hilarious conversation about why we write the way we write—and I found myself learning as I laughed.
In the chapter on spelling, she explains why The New Yorker copy department only refers to Webster’s Third (or “Web 3”) after exhausting any references in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (“the Little Red Web”), and “Web II” (Webster’s New International Dictionary (Unabridged), Second Edition). Dashes, she says, “like table forks, come in different sizes, and there is a proper use for each.” I particularly enjoyed the chapters on commas (Chapter 5: Comma Comma Comma Comma, Chameleon), hyphens, and the apostrophe. In one illustration about hyphenating two words to form a compound, she opines “I like the hyphen in ‘high-school principal’ because there actually is such a word as ‘school principal,’ and if the school principal is high she should be escorted off the premises and given a TV series.”
It’s not all grammar, punctuation, and the author’s experiences, though. She also discusses the use of profanity, gender, and pencils.
No writer wants to be caught making foolish errors that distract from the plot and leave the reader with a low opinion of the author. So if writers must learn the rules, why not do it with a bit of humor?
About the author: Elizabeth S. Kimball is the author of “The Gatlins Come to East Beach” which will be published in Volume II of By the Bay: East Beach Stories in 2017.
