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Books

The New Yorker’s grammar rules (and how to break them)

Mary Norris’s Between You and Me takes a charmingly pragmatic approach to its own eccentric advice

16 May 2015

9:00 AM

16 May 2015

9:00 AM

Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen Mary Norris

W.W. Norton, pp.228, £15.99

‘I had had a fantasy for years about owning a dairy farm,’ says Mary Norris, as she considers her career options in the first section of this odd but charming cross between a memoir and a usage guide. ‘I liked cows: they led a placid yet productive life.’

Instead, she found a productive life — if not always as placid as she might have liked — as a copy editor on the New Yorker magazine.

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