Since I got my second shingles shot yesterday, I’m not good for much today, so I thought I’d read a book my sister got me for my birthday: Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style.

It reminds me a lot of Eats, Shoots & Leaves in that it’s waaaaaay more readable than one of the classic style guides or a grammar textbook while managing to cover a lot of very important information about how grammar works (including an entire section on ghost rules! yay!).

But I think there’s one aspect that less-experienced writers might find confusing. As you may have gathered from the subtitle, the book isn’t really intended to be the final word on anything.

The problem in my mind stems from the fact that Dreyer will sometimes posit his pet preferences as the “correct” (or more accurately, standard) way. They are not. If he’s noting that, hey, all the style guides disagree with him, but they’re wrong, you need to realize that he is espousing something that is not standard.

It’s fine if you want to use what Dreyer thinks ought to be standard English—maybe you agree with him that Dreyer’s English is better than regular English! But if you’re trying to convince a reader that you actually do know how to drive a bus, then you’re much better off using one of those standard style books he occasionally disagrees with.