Between You and Me: Confessions of Comma Queen Audiobook (Free)

Mary Norris has spent more than three decades in The New Yorker’s copy department, maintaining its celebrated high standards. Today she brings her huge experience, good cheer, and finely sharpened pencils to help ordinary people in a boisterous vocabulary book as full of life as it is normally of practical guidance. Between You & Me features Norris’s laugh-out-loud descriptions of some of the most common and vexing complications in spelling, punctuation, and usage-comma faults, danglers, ‘who’ vs. ‘whom,’ ‘that’ about Between You and Me: Confessions of Comma Queen vs. ‘which,’ substance phrases, gender-neutral language-and her very clear explanations of the way to handle them. Down-to-earth and often open-minded, she pulls on good examples from Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and the Lord’s Prayer, aswell as from your Honeymooners, The Simpsons, David Foster Wallace, and Gillian Flynn. She takes us to visit a duplicate of Noah Webster’s groundbreaking Blue-Back Speller, on a quest to learn who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick, on a pilgrimage towards the world’s only pencil-sharpener museum, and inside the hallowed halls of THE BRAND 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 vocabulary and alive towards the glories of its use in America, even in age autocorrect and spell-check. As Norris writes, ‘The dictionary is an excellent thing, but you can’t allow it drive you around.’