Product Description

Hilarious. . . . This book charmed my socks off. Patricia OConner, Mary Norris has spent more than three decades in 's copy department, maintaining its celebrated high standards. Now she brings her vast experience, good cheer, and finely sharpened pencils to help the rest of us in a boisterous language book as full of life as it is of practical advice. features Norris's laugh-out-loud descriptions of some of the most common and vexing problems in spelling, punctuation, and usagecomma faults, danglers, "who" vs. "whom," "that" vs. "which," compound words, gender-neutral languageand her clear explanations of how to handle them. Down-to-earth and always open-minded, she draws on examples from Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and the Lord's Prayer, as well as from , , David Foster Wallace, and Gillian Flynn. She takes us to see a copy of Noah Webster's groundbreaking Blue-Back Speller, on a quest to find out who put the hyphen in , on a pilgrimage to the world's only pencil-sharpener museum, and inside the hallowed halls of and her work with such celebrated writers as Pauline Kael, Philip Roth, and George Saunders.Readersand writerswill find in Norris neither a scold nor a softie but a wise and witty new friend in love with language and alive to the glories of its use in America, even in the age of autocorrect and spell-check. As Norris writes, "The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can't let it push you around."