Between you & me : confessions of a Comma Queen / Mary Norris.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Norris, Mary, 1952-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Norris, Mary, 1952-.

Norris, Mary.

New Yorker (New York, N.Y. : 1925)--Officials and employees--Biography.

New Yorker (New York, N.Y. : 1925).

English language--Punctuation.

English language.

Comma.

English language--Errors of usage.

Copy editing.

Women periodical editors--United States--Biography.

Women periodical editors.

United States.

Genre:

Biographies.

Autobiographies.

Physical Description:

228 pages ; 22 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Other Title:

Between you and me

Place of Publication:

New York : W.W. Norton & Company, [2015]

Summary:

Mary Norris has spent more than three decades in The New Yorker'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. Between You & Me features Norris's laugh-out-loud descriptions of some of the most common and vexing problems in spelling, punctuation, and usage comma faults, danglers, "who" vs. "whom," "that" vs. "which," compound words, gender-neutral language and 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 The Honeymooners, The Simpsons, 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 Moby-Dick, on a pilgrimage to the world's only pencil-sharpener museum, and inside the hallowed halls of The New Yorker and her work with such celebrated writers as Pauline Kael, Philip Roth, and George Saunders. Readers and writers will find in Norris neither a scold nor a softie but a 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."

Contents:

Confessions of a Comma Queen

Spelling is for weirdos

That witch!

The problem of Heesh

Between you and me

Comma comma comma comma, chameleon

Who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick?

A dash, a semicolon, and a colon walk into a bar

What's up with the apostrophe

F*ck this sh*t

Ballad of a pencil junkie

The million-dollar copy editor

Appendix. Some books I have found particularly helpful.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 205-212) and index.

ISBN:

9780393240184

0393240185

OCLC:

897468521