Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

Being copyedited well—having a wise and sympathetic reader improve your sentences—is one of life's great pleasures, and perhaps the highest praise I can give Dreyer's English is to say it made me desperate to write a book for Random House so he might copyedit it. Apparently, though, if you're not Elizabeth Strout he doesn't do that anymore, so the next best thing is to follow him on Twitter or read this guide, whose* chatty style and loosey-goosey organization are tip-offs that the "utterly" in his title is somewhat tongue in cheek. He has standards (and peeves), but he has humor (lots of it) and an understanding that editing is an art and a dialogue. You want to be his friend, and not only because he's more likely to cite Gypsy Rose Lee's The G-String Murders than, say, T.S. Eliot. Best of all: he loves semicolons and Shirley Jackson (who loved semicolons).