Dreyer's English

First annotation on Apr 13th, 2022.

9 quotes

Go a week without writing very rather really quite in factApr 13 2022 12:10PM
toss out—“just” (not in the sense of “righteous” but in the sense of “merely”) and “so” (in the “extremely” sense, though as conjunctions go it’s pretty disposable too).Apr 13 2022 12:11PM
Oh yes: “pretty.” As in “pretty tedious.” Or “pretty pedantic.” Go ahead and kill that particular darling.Apr 13 2022 12:11PM
And “of course.” That’s right out. And “surely.” And “that said.” And “actually”? Feel free to go the rest of your life without another “actually.”*Apr 13 2022 12:11PM

I’m mindful of Gertrude Stein’s characterization of Ezra Pound as “a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not,” and no one wants to be that guyApr 13 2022 12:14PM
Chandler sent this note to the editor of The Atlantic Monthly in response to the copyediting of an article he’d written: By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split. Over and out.Apr 13 2022 12:23PM
In a sentence written in the passive voice, the thing that is acted upon is frontloaded, and the thing doing the acting comes at the end. In either case, we can easily agree that clowns are terrifying.Apr 13 2022 12:28PM
Often, in a sentence constructed in the passive voice, the actor is omitted entirely. Sometimes this is done in an attempt to call attention to a problem without laying blame (“The refrigerator door was left open”) and sometimes, in weasel-like fashion, to avoid taking responsibility: “Mistakes were made,”Apr 13 2022 12:29PM
If you can append “by zombies” to the end of a sentence (or, yes, “by the clown”), you’ve indeed written a sentence in the passive voice.Apr 13 2022 12:29PM

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