Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

"Between You and Me is part memoir, part guide to the mind-bending nuances of English grammar, part homage to The New Yorker — where Mary Norris has spent more than 20 years as a highly specialized proofreader — and completely delightful. It brims with wit, personality and commas. Norris is a stickler who can’t resist shtick. She pounces gleefully on typos and is as passionate about sharp pencils — soft graphite Palomina Blackwing 602 pencils, to be specific — as she is about sharp writing. Despite her insistence on maintaining grammatical standards, a prim and regal comma queen she is not. In fact, she is vociferous in her defense of judiciously deployed profanity — which adds punch to her explanation of why “between you and I,” in trying to be “so [bleep]ing polite,” is just wrong, wrong, wrong."