Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 226

Here a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style," by Benjamin Dreyer.



If words are the flesh, muscle, and bone of prose, punctuation is the breath. In support of the words you’ve carefully selected, punctuation is your best means of conveying to the reader how you mean your writing to be read, how you mean for it to sound. A comma sounds different than a semicolon; parentheses make a different noise than dashes.

BASED OFF OF No. Just no. “An intentional tremor, with prepositions,” as a friend described it. The inarguably—so don’t argue with me—correct phrase is “based on.”

There’s a thing called a phrasal verb, which is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a verb in the form of a phrase, often including a preposition and/or an adverb, and when one of these shows up in a title, both its bits get capped, as in, say: 

Hold On to Your Hats! 

(whereas the “on” in The Mill on the Floss is lowercased)

Streets lit by gaslight are gaslit. 

The past tense of the verb “gaslight”—as in that which Charles Boyer does to Ingrid Bergman in the eponymous 1944 MGM thriller by undermining her belief in reality to the point she believes she’s going mad—is “gaslighted.”