His new book, “Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style,” is the climax (so far) of his nearly three decades in the copy-editing business, and it shows his playful sense of humor as well as his deep appreciation for clear writing and good language. The book is full of no-nonsense pronouncements on matters like the Oxford comma (use it) and the word “literally” (use it at your peril). It is also idiosyncratic, because writing style is highly personal, subject to an individual’s taste and whim.

Image Credit... Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times

That’s why “could care less” might bug you, but does not bug him. (“I appreciate its indirect sarcasm.”) It is why, by his own admission, he is perhaps overly fond of parentheses and of the word “quite,” and also why he applauds a nice semicolon. (“The best thing to know about semicolons is that Shirley Jackson liked them,” he said, of the author of “The Haunting of Hill House.” “End of discussion.”) As he writes, “If the English language itself is notoriously irregular and irrational, why shouldn’t its practitioners be too?”

Dreyer, 60, was born in Queens and raised in Albertson, Long Island. He did not set out to be a writing guru; he set out to be an actor, but actually became a waiter. In Manhattan in the early 1990s, facing the prospect of the middle-of-the-night shift at Forty Four, the Royalton Hotel’s restaurant, he instead took a job as a freelance proofreader for St. Martin’s Press after claiming to his future boss that he owned a copy of the ninth edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, which was true, and that he was familiar with standard proofreading symbols, which was not. (Luckily, they were set out right there in the dictionary, under “P,” and he is a quick study.)

He loved the job, and the job loved him. “It’s like a treasure hunt and the treasure is bad,” he explained. “It turns out that I have a very good ear, and a nose for finding mistakes.”