Greetings, writers—
These newsletters tend to be tonally casual affairs. This isn’t to say that I don’t labor over them (although often it feels like 75% of my efforts go toward deciding what to write about), but sometimes I’m loose with grammar, or I use silly internetty abbreviations (I’m looking at you, ‘tbh’), or I misspell words on purpose or put “uh” in the middle of a sentence, surrounded by commas, as if it were an appositive or a nonrestrictive clause (surprise, it is neither).
This has all been deliberate, but nevertheless I felt ever so slightly ashamed when I opened my copy of Dreyer’s English.
Benjamin Dreyer was the managing editor and copy chief at Random House until 2023, and his eponymous book on English language usage was a New York Times bestseller. On the book’s first page, he offers a challenge.
For a week, he says, go without writing the following words:
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