Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

As a bad writer, I like reading about mechanical things I can do to make my writing better, which means I liked this book which gave me many of them in an enjoyable and amusing style.

I didn't always agree--for example, I'd learned in school that "personal opinion" wasn't a redundancy but was meant to make a distinction from "professional opinion." At other times I thought redundancies could service as intensifiers. "A rose is a rose is a rose " says more than tautology.

The internet informs me that a "Dreyer" is one who fashioned objects on a lathe; a turner of wood or bone; a nickname derived from German `drei' meaning three. I don't get how three enters into it, or whether "enters into" is a redundancy, but I'm interested in words and so I looked it up. If you're interested in words, you'll like this book.

The first part of Dreyer's English is both instructive and entertaining. The second part, however, um... There is a recommendation in the first part: "Get a good dictionary;" following this advice is adding more value than reading the second part with its twitter-sourced word-lists and puns that get old really fast.