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We Asked Copyediting Legend Mary Norris to Correct Some 2020 Candidate Tweets

John Delaney needs a little help.

Mary Norris. Photograph by Josef Astor.

Word geeks and fans of New Yorker lore adore Mary Norris’s 2015 book, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. Ahead of a local appearance to promote her latest, Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen, we asked the copyediting legend to take a pass at some tweets from 2020 candidates. One typically Norrisian note of clarification that we couldn’t help but include: “In the long tweet from John Delaney, I decided to get the facts right and fit the message into the 280-character Twitter format, so I took liberties. Alternatively, he could have made his point by commenting on his own tweet to create a thread, but enough is enough, right?”


Mary Norris will speak about her new book at Politics and Prose (Connecticut Avenue) on April 14. The event is free.  

This article appears in the April 2019 issue of Washingtonian.

Daniella Byck
Lifestyle Editor

Daniella Byck joined Washingtonian in 2022. She was previously with Outside Magazine and lives in Northeast DC.