Between You and Me cover art

Between You and Me

Confessions of Comma Queen

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Between You and Me

Written by: Mary Norris
Narrated by: Mary Norris
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About this listen

Mary Norris has spent more than three decades in The New Yorker's copy department, maintaining its celebrated high standards. Now she brings her vast experience, good cheer, and finely sharpened pencils to help the rest of us in a boisterous language audiobook as full of life as it is of practical advice. Between You & Me features Norris' laugh-out-loud descriptions of some of the most common and vexing problems in spelling, punctuation, and usage - comma faults, danglers, "who" versus "whom", "that" versus "which", compound words, gender-neutral language - and her clear explanations of how to handle them. Down-to-earth and always open minded, she draws on examples from Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and the Lord's Prayer as well as from The Honeymooners, The Simpsons, David Foster Wallace, and Gillian Flynn. She takes us to see a copy of Noah Webster's groundbreaking Blue-Back Speller, on a quest to find out who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick, on a pilgrimage to the world's only pencil-sharpener museum, and inside the hallowed halls of The New Yorker and her work with such celebrated writers as Pauline Kael, Philip Roth, and George Saunders.

Listeners - and writers - will find in Norris neither a scold nor a softie but a wise and witty new friend in love with language and alive to the glories of its use in America, even in the age of autocorrect and spell-check. As Norris writes, "The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can't let it push you around."

©2015 Mary Norris (P)2015 Recorded Books
Biographies & Memoirs Education & Learning Witty New York

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Loved it, really

Delightful! Thoroughly entertaining, lots of interesting and funny stories about the world of editing. Packaged with digestible wisdom on the correct use of punctuation: commas, colons and semi-colons. Tantalizing nuggets of writing read with and without the punctuation, or with misplaced commas, kept it going. Highly recommended.

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