Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris (review)

Mary Norris’s book, her first, defies easy genre classification. Between You & Me is a marriage à la mode(s): part memoir, part usage manual. Reviewers of the book on Amazon.com complain that Amazon has wrongly classified it as ‘reference.’ While it does have an index that lets readers look up specific points of usage, such as who versus whom, the book lacks the customary layout of a reference book: no lists, no columns of paired examples, no sidebars, none of the apparatus that invites browsing. And its coverage of usage matters is too selective to make it a comprehensive guide on grammar and style.

The rewards of the book are to be found in Norris’s nuanced and often humorous explanations of usage rules, specifically the subset of rules that can trip up even experienced writers: the banana skins of formal style. Norris’s explanations come alive in the context of her stories, and readers willing to accept the book’s linearity and limited scope are more likely to read it through and enjoy it. Readers who want self-service in the way of a reference book will find themselves working against the book’s current, which draws readers along by the pull of its narration.

Norris’s credentials as an authority on style come from her more than thirty-five years as copy editor for The New Yorker, a general-interest periodical that is famous for its punctilious observance of the finer points of American English. In keeping with the magazine’s elite status, Norris’s current job title, she tells us, is unique in periodical publishing. She is ‘a page OK’er—a position that exists only at The New Yorker, where you query-proofread pieces and manage them, with the editor, the author, a fact checker, and a second proofreader, until they go to press’ (12).

Working for the stylistically tory New Yorker commits Norris professionally to the school of prescriptivism, a school of language use that defines itself against descriptivism. The New Yorker famously championed prescriptivism when it published a screed against Webster’s Third, a dictionary issued in 1961, which listed nonstandard words such as ain’t and spellings such as mischievious (a variant of mischievous) that some English speakers and writers use despite the disapproval of others. The New Yorker’s objection to Webster’s Third was that it validated colloquialisms, alternative meanings, and variant spellings without sufficiently warning readers that such usages are not just nonstandard but substandard, at least to those who think so and know better. Even today, Webster’s Third has third-rate status on the dictionary shelf at The New Yorker, which otherwise considers Webster to have lexicography’s last word.

The New Yorker’s long history of upholding prescriptivism stands behind Norris’s training as a copy editor and informs the occupational anecdotes that frame her grammar lessons. One might think her career as style keeper at The New Yorker would make her inflexible and righteous about matters of usage, but secretly Norris bridles at having to play by the New Yorker rulebook. That is one of the confessions implied in her subtitle. She has never occupied a position of power at The New Yorker, only a supporting role. Her long career at the magazine, as more of a worker bee than a comma queen, has turned her into a meditative and at times even conflicted copy editor. Here she is at one of her more confessional moments in the book:

So much of copy editing is about not going beyond your province. . . Writers might think we’re applying rules and sticking it to their prose in order to make it fit some standard, but just as often we’re backing off, making exceptions, or at least trying to find a balance between doing too much and doing too little. A lot of the decisions you have to make...