Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

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Thorndike Press, 2015 - Biography & Autobiography - 285 pages

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 wise and witty 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.""

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About the author (2015)

Mary Norris is an American author and copy editor. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, she graduated from Douglass College of Rutgers University in 1974, and earned a master's in English from the University of Vermont. Mary joined the editorial staff at The New Yorker in 1978, and has been a copy editor and proofreader there for more than 30 years. She has also been a contributor to "The Talk of the Town" and newyorker.com. Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen is her first book.