Between You and Me: A Glorious Grammar Guide

Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen is a book about grammar and the vagaries of the English language, written by Mary Norris, a copy editor for the New Yorker. That description is all you need to know. There are people who care about English and people who don't. If you are one of the latter, this is not the book for you. If you are one of the former, read on.

Mary Norris is a fascinating woman. The book starts off as a personal memoir, recounting her odd jobs after college, which centered a great deal on the dairy industry for some bizarre reason. However, she eventually wound up in the offices of the New Yorker, and decades later, there she remains, a brilliant copy editor who gets to oversee some of the best literature the English language has to offer up. The book alternates between telling her personal history and serving as an intriguing English guide, dissecting the various quandaries that Norris encounters in her daily life, both in a professional and social capacity.

There is a discussion of commas, profanity, the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, deliberations on the merits of the various dictionaries used by the New Yorker and other esteemed publications. Of course, as the title suggests, she is quick to clear up when you use "I" versus "me," a conversational tic that does bother most fastidious English-language speakers. There is a chapter devoted to other forms of punctuation, including a long discourse on the em dash, which prompted me to e-mail my college thesis advisor, who was the first person to alert me to the fact that there was such a thing as an em dash. Not sure when to use "who" versus "whom"? This book's got you covered. And if it isn't hyper-specialized enough for you, the final chapter is all about pencils, a topic that I never suspected could occupy anyone for a paragraph, let alone an entire chapter.

Mary Norris is a grammar geek and proud of it. She offers an insight into the minds of people who simply love language and want to make sense of its bizarre rules. Most interestingly, she defines the role of the perfect copy editor - someone who has to clean up the prose but do so in as unobtrusive and helpful a manner as possible. Norris discusses many examples where following the rules of good grammar would destroy great literature and she therefore chose to value substance over style. Her stories about her interactions with writers are fantastic, showcasing how much these authors value the editing process and that they really do put an infinite amount of care into the placement of their commas.

Between You & Me is a quick read, a delightfully nerdy investigation into questions that puzzle the most well-read and well-educated among us. I can't promise you will read this book and instantly experience a revelation about semicolons. But between you and me, you'll certainly learn just how much you didn't know about the power of punctuation.