The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

My favorite summer read wasn't a frothy love story or a sassy bit of chick lit. Believe it or not, the book I couldn't put down was a fun, smart and entertaining book about English grammar. It's true. I must confess that I am a bit of a grammar geek. I revel in the intricacies of the English language. I actually enjoyed diagramming sentences in high school English class and fully respect the power of well-placed punctuation and thoughtful word choice.

Mary Norris, a veteran copy editor for the New Yorker magazine, wrote Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen as part memoir and part grammar guide. Strange as it sounds, the combination worked for me. The New Yorker is a literary magazine published 47 times a year. It is respected for maintaining high literary standards, fanatical fact checking and rigorous copyediting. Norris hails from Ohio and one of the many jobs she endured before landing in New York was a foot checker at a public swimming pool. Gross.

Norris began her career at the New Yorker in the editorial library in 1975. She spent the next 15 years (the New Yorker would spell out fifteen – ALL numbers are spelled out) working her way up to page OK'er, a position, she says, found only at the New Yorker. In that position, Norris says she query-proofread pieces and managed them with the editor, the author, a fact checker and second proofreader until each piece was deemed ready to go to press. Norris says that page OK'ers are also known as prose goddesses or comma queens in the editorial halls of the publication. I was intrigued by the behind the scenes "machinery" that makes a quality publication like the New Yorker possible.

Although Norris is a fellow grammar enthusiast (never a rigid zealot), her writing style is so witty and personable that the points of grammar she discusses fascinate rather than repel the reader. Chapters like Comma Comma Comma Comma Chameleon, Who Put the Hyphen in Moby-Dick? and A Dash, a Semicolon and a Colon Walk into a Bar point to a writer who knows how to inject humor into a topic that most people find as appealing as burnt toast. The chapter titled Ballad of a Pencil Junkie was my favorite.

Between You and Me might never appeal to a wide audience of readers, but I hope that some readers will set aside their prejudice towards grammar and give Mary Norris the opportunity to bring some fun and enlightenment to the subject.