BENJAMIN DREYER, born on this date, is an American writer and was the copy chief at Random House until he retired in 2023 and the author of Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style (2019).

Early in his career, Dreyer pursued writing and acting. He worked in bars and restaurants before turning to freelance proofreading, then copy editing. In 1993 he joined Random House full time as a production editor. He was promoted from group manager to senior managing editor and copy chief in 2008 and served as vice-president, executive managing editor and copy chief, at the Random House division of Penguin Random House. until 2023. Supervising the publication of hundreds of titles a year—The New York Times describes Dreyer’s role as “style-arbiter-of-last-resort”—he works only with novelist Elizabeth Strout as the sole author he continues to copy-edit himself.

Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style was published in the US in January 2019, with a UK edition to follow in May 2019. Dreyer began the project as a revision of an internal memo to advise copy editors and proofreaders at Random House. The memo expanded to about 20 pages and eventually Dreyer became interested in developing it as a book, published with Random House. Dreyer’s English debuted at number nine on The New York Times bestseller list for “Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous” and received enthusiastic reviews. In The New Yorker, Katy Waldman wrote that “Dreyer beckons readers by showing that his rules make prose pleasurable…The author’s delight in his tool kit is palpable.” In Paste, Frannie Jackson recommends the book as “invaluable to everyone who wants to shore up their writing skills and an utter treat for anyone who simply revels in language.” In The Wall Street Journal, Ben Yagoda finds “wisdom and good sense on nearly every page of ‘Dreyer’s English.'” (Yagoda also notes a trend of “copy editors’ memoirs-cum-style guides”, comparing Dreyer’s English to “the splendid Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen” from New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris.)

The Washington Post called Dreyer “the unofficial language guru on Twitter”