Highlights
- Copy editing is a rules engine run by a human — Dreyer's craft is applying an explicit, layered rule set (house style over convention over taste) to raw prose; for any content system spanning hundreds of pieces, that rule set is exactly what a style pipeline encodes.
- Real rules vs superstitions — he cheerfully demolishes the "never split an infinitive / never start with And" folklore while defending the rules that actually serve clarity; the discernment every rules layer needs, in prose or in data: keep the checks that protect meaning, delete the cargo cult.
- Consistency is a quality dimension for text — hyphenation, capitalization, and number style matter less in any single instance than in being uniform across the corpus; the editorial twin of consistency as a data-quality dimension.
- The first pass: delete the padding words — his opening challenge (drop very, rather, quite, in fact and their friends) is a mechanical, checkable transformation that improves nearly all prose; a style rule so crisp it could run as an automated lint.
- Clarity is the terminal value — every rule in the book answers to whether the reader understands effortlessly; the same test that separates useful modeling standards from bureaucratic ones.
- Style guides are living documents with an owner — Random House's house style evolves by deliberate decision, not drift; the STYLEGUIDE-as-authority pattern the SBM site already follows.
Highlights on this page are generated with the help of AI.