In a conversation about grammar and style over at Literary Hub, Mary Norris and Benjamin Dreyer were asked the number one grammar rule that everyone should know.
Dreyer, vice president, executive managing editor, and copy chief of Random House, got right to it: “People would do well to learn the difference between ‘who’ and ‘whom,'” he said, along with ‘I’ and ‘me’ and, for that matter, ‘they’ and ‘them.’
Norris, copy editor at The New Yorker, had a slightly more…nuanced response. “You can have friends,” she said, “or you can correct people’s grammar.”
