Guardian of grammar enjoys internet's writing evolution

US grammar expert Benjamin Dreyer has a reassuring message about the state of the English language: it's not as bad as people think.

"I think the level of writing right now is perilously high, there's a lot of great writing going on," he told AAP.

Dreyer would know, having edited copy from the likes of Elizabeth Strout, E L Doctorow and Michael Chabon.

The long-reigning copy chief and style arbiter at Penguin Random House and author of Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, is coming to Melbourne for the writers festival in May.

He's charming, enormously likeable and has never ventured south of the equator.

And any Down Under prose pedants hoping he'll join in their despair at the internet's linguistic impacts should prepare for disappointment.

Dreyer, whose thoughts on semicolons are followed by almost 100,000 people on Twitter, believes the internet has simply spurred a linguistic evolution.

"That evolution is actually sometimes kind of speedy, in a way that I find really wonderful to both observe and participate in," he said.

It's a refreshing approach from the grammar guru, whose style manual has become a worthy heir to the much-loved Strunk and White's Elements of Style, and vastly more successful than Dreyer ever hoped.

Dreyer's English looks at the rules of writing and pulls them apart, so readers can see that the rights and wrongs are not simply arbitrary.

He wants writers to be less afraid and more thoughtful, because sometimes there's good reason to begin a sentence with "and" or "but".

"There are things that make people technically better writers, but the constant refrain is there's always nuance, there's almost always another shade of grey," he said.

That said, there are some things that call for Dreyer's red pen.

Sentences that begin with "If I'm honest", for one, and the much-used phrase "At the end of the day".

These days, aside from his role at Penguin Random House, he copy-edits two authors only.

He edits Elizabeth Strout, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge, an experience he describes as amazing and joyful.

It helps when the author is a genius, according to Dreyer, who is now so familiar with Strout's authorial voice he says it's a kind of mind-meld.

He has also copy-edited a collection of US literary luminary Shirley Jackson's previously unpublished material.

The author of The Haunting of Hill House died in 1965, and Dreyer had to be particularly careful with the changes he made.

"A lot of this material was first draft stuff that had never escaped her drawers ... particularly with an author who can't answer back, you have to be doubly respectful," he said.

Editors in general don't get enough credit, he says, but ultimately their job is to be invisible, to step back and let the author take the credit.

As a copy editor, he doesn't make structural changes or alter character arcs, but examines a manuscript sentence by sentence, trying to shape the best possible version of an author's book.

It's possible to think this work is merely ferreting out mistakes, and his book a compilation of rules that will soon date, but Dreyer sees his work in a more political sense.

In the era of Donald Trump, words are distorted and used to deceive, but ultimately Dreyer insists that words must be used honestly.

His flight to Melbourne will be his first plane trip in three years, and his spot on the opening night slate his first time in a crowd for a very long while.

To be honest, at the end of the day he couldn't be more excited. 

"I'm just looking forward to the energy of it and being part of something exciting that's about books and words, and not just looking into a computer."

Melbourne Writers Festival runs May 4 to 7.