Becoming a 'good user' of English

 “How do you become a good user of English?  Well, a person should read. And read, and read. Preferably good things. I might suggest The New Yorker, for instance.” – Mary Norris  

Norris, born in Cleveland in 1952, is a longtime copy editor at The New Yorker, a magazine justly famous for the care it takes with words.  To read about common mistakes many writers make, take a look at her excellent book, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen.

The title, she said, references the mistake of "using I instead of me in phrases such as 'between you and me'.   How can you tell when you're messing it up? Put the 'I' first.  You might make a mistake — I hope not — and say 'between you and I,' but you would never make the mistake of saying 'between I and you.'"

  

Norris began working at The New Yorker in 1978 and said that over her many years there she’s worked with all kinds of writers, great and small, but one of the easiest was the wonderful John Updike.

 

“John Updike was very careful in his prose and very attuned to details," Norris said.  "The only danger there was that it was so slick, your pencil would slide off the page! It was really beautifully done.”