Available for hire

Experienced editor, with three decades of experience and temporarily at liberty, offers to provide editorial and other services:

Will edit specimens of your newspaper, magazine, newsletter, Web site, or blog, correcting errors of fact, spelling, punctuation, grammar, and English usage; will also identify infelicities of expression and flaws in structure.

Will proofread your thesis, article, or presentation and suggest corrections and improvements.

Will draft for you news releases, handbills, and similar public announcements.

Will draft for you letters of complaint to persons, companies, or agencies that have done you an injury.* (Not responsible for results.)

Will deliver lectures or conduct workshops on writing and editing. (List of workshops available on request.)

Will speak to your class, club, or other group on writing, editing, and journalism.

Will coach you in the delivery of a speech or paper, the telling of a joke, and acceptable pronunciation.

Will correct the scansion of your song lyrics or other verses.

Will offer personal instruction in tying the bow tie or making the martini.

Fees are negotiable. References on request.


Contact information:

John E. McIntyre
5516 Plymouth Road
Baltimore, MD 21214
410-963-2931
jemcintyre@gmail.com




*Please, no matters regarding inheritances, uncollected winnings from foreign lotteries, or romantic entanglements.

We like it vulgar

Returning from a festival of Janeites in Britain, my friend the redoubtable Marie Sprayberry (Best Person when I married Kathleen in 1982) made a present to me of a reprint of The Vulgar Tongue, a dictionary of slang published by Francis Grose in 1785. It is a gem.

Rummaging about in it, I was able to point my son, J.P., the cook, to the entry on cupboard love: “Pretended love to the cook, or any other person, for the sake of a meal.” Now he is alerted to the hazard.

I also came across fice: “A small windy escape backwards [a playful euphemism for fart], more obvious to the nose than ears; frequently by old ladies charged on their lap-dogs.” Blaming the dog thus has a venerable pedigree.

Fice is also a slang word I recall from my childhood in Kentucky, for a small, inconsequential or irritating mongrel dog. The Oxford English Dictionary says that the word derives from fist (pronounced with a long i), for breaking wind. (Cf. feisty.)

The book also describes a useful technique for derailing bores, kittle pitchering: “A jocular method of hobbling or bothering a troublesome teller of long stories; this is done by contradicting some very immaterial circumstance at the beginning of the narration, the objections to which being settled, others are immediately started to some new particular of like consequence; thus impeding, or rather not suffering him to enter into, the main story. Kittle pitchering is often practised in confederacy, one relieving the other, by which the design is rendered less obvious.”

I will now be alert to this strategy.

And to this one: scraping. “A mode of expressing dislike to a person, or sermon, practised at Oxford by the students, in scraping their feet against the ground during the preachment. ...”

And to that one.

Native-born looniness

Over at Baltimoresun.com, TV critic David Zurawik had the temerity to suggest that Lou Dobbs’s continued attention to the crackpot “birther” conspiracy theory on CNN — after his own network had discredited it — presents a problem for CNN. He might as well have picked up a stick and swung at a wasps’ nest, because the comments on his post now feature of swarm of loonies.*

All the conventions of conspiracy nuttiness are on display in those comments: refusal to acknowledge facts — statements by public officials and investigation by impartial organizations such as Politifact.com; insistence on unsubstantiated facts, such as the recently produced “Kenyan birth certificate”**; tortured readings of the Constitution; accusations of complicity in the conspiracy by anyone who disputes its contentions, combined with ad hominem attacks; and syntax more tangled than the Gordian knot. Add to it the veiled, or not-so-veiled, racism, and you have classic American hysteria.

We’ve been there before. John Adams, the public was assured, was a closet monarchist out to betray the Revolution, Thomas Jefferson was a Jacobin who would have property owners slaughtered in their beds, Andrew Jackson was a would-be Bonapartist dictator; Abraham Lincoln was an ignoramus (“the original gorilla,” General McClellan called him), Franklin Roosevelt was an insane syphilitic who connived at the attack on Pearl Harbor (two separate rumors), Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist (according to the John Birch Society), and George W. Bush staged the attacks of September 11 to contrive a pretext for going to war. In this historical context, the Obama birth hysteria is trivial.

People in turbulent times who feel threatened by circumstances and fearful, particularly if they are uneducated or unsophisticated, are prone to be credulous about conspiracy theories. And there are always public figures who are quick to channel that emotional energy into their own political purposes. The Know Nothing party’s effort to transmute nativist distress over German and Irish immigration into electoral power in the mid-19th century is a classic example. If your ancestors were German or Irish (or anything other than English/Scottish/Welsh), remember that people like you were once held to be threats to the Republic, and strenuous efforts were made to keep them out.

The House is on vacation, and the Senate is about to adjourn as well, so it’s foreseeable that for the next few weeks the news media, lacking nonsense produced by elected officials, will have to resort to unofficial sources. The birthers will be there.

The birther hysteria is just the just the kind of phenomenon that H.L. Mencken used to say “makes the United States a buffoon among the great nations.”





*I said very much the same thing over the weekend, but fortunately, no one cares what copy editors think about anything, so I have not been favored with the attention of cranks.

**If the birthers insist that the birth record produced by the State of Hawaii is a forgery, how can they be sure that the purported Kenyan document produced by Orly Taitz is genuine? My prediction: The Taitz document will be exposed as a forgery, and it will make no difference.

Take responsibility

In an extraordinary article, Clark Hoyt, the public editor for The New York Times, takes us through the process by which a retrospective article on Walter Cronkite by Alessandra Stanley was published with an astonishing number of errors intact. *

While I admire The Times for employing Mr. Hoyt and having the courage to publish an article explaining the paper’s embarrassment, the circumstances described therein point to some serious shortcomings. The main problem, it appears, lies with the author: “For all her skills as a critic, Stanley was the cause of so many corrections in 2005 that she was assigned a single copy editor responsible for checking her facts.” When that copy editor was assigned to other duties, the errors resumed.

So the paper has a writer who cannot get things right, and the solution is to assign someone to fix things for her rather than to require her to be accurate. Amazing.**
Here’s the main thing, and it is more urgent today, with the depletion of copy desks, than it has ever been:

You, the reporter/writer, are responsible for the accuracy of what you write. It is your job to make sure that every statement of fact, every quotation, is represented accurately. If you slap something together and turn it in assuming that someone else will clean up after you, you are committing malpractice.

But what really dumbfounded me was the account of a copy editor — at The Times, which, God save the mark, still takes copy editing more seriously than most other publications — who started work on the Stanley article as an advance, was drawn away to daily copy, and never returned to the Stanley article because “she assumed that someone else would pick up the editing later [emphasis added].”

On my old copy desk at The Sun, may its memory endure, a copy editor who picked up a story stayed with it. And if the editing had to be interrupted by some delay, the copy editor would leave a note at the top of the story indicating that the editing was incomplete and pointing to questions or issues that remained to be addressed. This point is also more essential than it has ever been:

If you are a copy editor, you do not let a story out of your hands until you have completed the editing.

This thing at The Times has a lot of fingerprints on it, and I assume, without expecting to see an auto-da-fe on Eighth Avenue, that The Times is issuing some godly admonitions to its writers, assigning editors, and copy editors about doing their jobs properly.

In the meantime, if any of you are sneering at The Times over this while you publish crackpot claims by birthers, or stories that the president’s health care proposal includes euthanasia of old people, or rumors that the military’s prototype biomass-eating robot will consume human flesh, you’ve got much to be ashamed of, too.




*Seven errors are mentioned in Mr. Hoyt’s article, but a correction of an eighth was published in yesterday’s editions of The Times: “An appraisal on July 18 about Walter Cronkite’s career misstated the name of the ABC evening news broadcast. While the program was called ‘World News Tonight’ when Charles Gibson became anchor in May 2006, it is now ‘World News With Charles Gibson,’ not ‘World News Tonight With Charles Gibson.’ ”

**Ah, crap, it’s not amazing at all. Every copy editor knows that publications indulge in stars, often columnists and critics but also reporters, who are not required to meet the standards expected of an intern. They don’t get things right, they can’t be edited, and they won’t be bothered.

The birthers' allergy to fact

I have in my files a birth certificate, some kind of ancient thermal copy with the seal of the Commonwealth of Kentucky impressed in it. I also possess a passport indicating that I am a citizen of the United States. Both of these documents could well be clever forgeries, produced by some sinister cabal whose designs were to infiltrate me into my former high position in the Eastern Liberal Media Establishment.*

If you believe that, you can believe anything. If you can believe anything, you join a growing constituency.

The “birther” movement, fueled by the Internet and figures like Shouting Lou Dobbs on CNN, clamors that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii in 1961, is not a U.S. citizen, is disqualified to be president of the United States.

These claims have been exploded by public officials in Hawaii, by PolitiFact.com, and by a lengthy article by McClatchy Newspapers that casts an instructive light on some of the foremost proponents of the birther allegations. Bill Pascoe, who had the unenviable task of managing Alan Keyes’s senatorial campaign against Obama in 2004, goes so far as to suggest in an article at CQ Politics that the mainstream media are pumping up coverage of birthers to discredit conservatives and prop up the president’s poll numbers.

Never mind. A poll commissioned by Daily Kos finds that Southerners and Republicans are disproportionately receptive to the idea that the president is not a citizen. And if you go to the McClatchy article, you’ll find any number of angry, frequently incoherent comments contesting the facts.

Conspiracy theories always appeal to the credulous in unsettled times, and the left is as prone to them as the right — I recall the rumors sweeping campus in 1972 that Richard Nixon was going to cancel the presidential election to fend of the challenge from George McGovern. (You’re permitted to chuckle here.) The birther fantasy feeds readily into Embattled White Guys hysteria — Pat Buchanan and Glen Beck proclaiming that the president hates white people and white culture — that political and cultural dominance is going to be taken away from those who think it belongs to them.

Refutation, which must be done by responsible media for the record, doesn’t work. Fact does not penetrate the birther mind set. The sane man or woman is left to take the Menckenian position that the whole spectacle is to be considered a burlesque for the entertainment of the intelligent.

Just sit back and watch the spittle fly.



*“He talks funny, like somebody from up North.” “He dresses funny, wears a damn bow tie.” “He reads books and uses big words to show off.” “He sent his children to lib’ral Eastern private colleges.” “What kind of Kentuckian does he think he is?”

Those Hundred Days

This week’s book, Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America by Adam Cohen (Penguin Press, 372 pages, $29.95), recounts circumstances of Franklin Roosevelt’s first days in office that will not startle the reader who has been paying attention to the events of 2009.

They included outright reversal of the policies of a discredited preceding administration, desperate and unprecedented efforts to deal with an impending collapse of the banking system, expensive measures to deal with large-scale unemployment, expansion of federal regulation, and loud cries from conservatives, particularly Republicans, that the nation was being dragged into socialism.

Mr. Cohen’s refreshing approach is to look at those events and measures not through the lens of the president’s office, but through the efforts of five top Roosevelt advisers: Raymond Moley, who was instrumental in the rescue of the banking industry but who grew increasingly conservative and ultimately broke with Roosevelt; Lewis Douglas, FDR’s budget director, who shared Roosevelt’s impulse to curb federal spending and balance the budget but who grew bitter when the tide of the New Deal ran against him; Henry Wallace, who rescued American agriculture but whose “temporary” program of price supports proved politically impossible to dismantle; Frances Perkins, who as labor secretary helped construct the scaffolding of relief and public-works programs that has become an essential part of the nation’s structure; and Harry Hopkins, who as much as anyone helped to establish a federal role in a welfare system.

Roosevelt himself is in the background here, coming to the fore as his subordinates jockey for his attention. Conservatives will snigger at Mr. Cohen’s description of him as at heart a fiscal conservative who wanted a lean government with a balanced budget, who had to be persuaded of the merit of the most radical New Deal measures, but anyone who studies the events of his administration will see how improvisational and experimental Roosevelt’s approach was, veering from one direction to another as results and political circumstances indicated.

This is a valuable book, both in its description of the battles among the competing figures of the administration and in its brief but compelling portraits of the five figures Mr. Cohen has chosen to highlight.

I don’t want to appear churlish, but I do have to mention that the book is written in the same undistinguished journalistic prose that marked American Pharaoh, the biography of Mayor Richard J. Daley that Mr. Cohen wrote with Elizabeth Taylor. The warning signs appear in the opening words: “Edmund Wilson, the well-known writer.” If we’ve come to the lamentable point that a reader has to be told who Edmund Wilson was, then tell the reader something meaningful about him. We learn later that Roosevelt created “an alphabet soup of new agencies,” a cliche at least seventy years old, that Hell’s Kitchen in New York was a “gritty neighborhood,” and more. You get the flavor.

To get a more elegantly written account of the Hundred Days, you might want to look at
Jonathan Alter’s The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope. It’s an excellent book.



Cohen


Alter

The joys of failure

It’s a pity that discussion in comments of the substance of my interview with On the Media has been sidetracked by Robert Knilands, who barged in to vent his spite and resentment about other editors.* But one of his remarks has been productive of thought:

Maybe someday it will dawn on you that John McIntyre is no longer on the copy desk, and that he walked out a failure, with his section a smoldering ruin. All his years of blathering, parsing words, wearing bow ties, and generally acting like a pompous ass were wasted.

Actually, though I am unemployed and looking for ways to do useful work again, I can’t share Mr. Knilands’s perception that I am a failure.

After all, I put in nearly thirty years of good work; though I didn’t catch every error or fix every shortcoming in the stories I edited, on the whole, the papers I worked on were better for my having been there.

Though the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun is drastically diminished, it still functions, and several of the editors I hired continue to work there in other positions, struggling heroically to move the operation into whatever new form it must take to survive.

Beyond that, several of the editors I hired have moved on to work at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Several of my students from Loyola College have also gone on to established positions in journalism. I have every reason to take pride in them.

This blog, the continuation of the one I started at The Sun, has had more than 12,000 visitors since May 1, and many of them have returned repeatedly.

Yes, it was a deep disappointment that I did not get to serve out my professional career at The Sun, with a voice in charting its new course and maintaining its standards, but on the day that I walked out of that newsroom, I did so with the affection and esteem of my colleagues. Call that failure if you will.

As for the bow ties and the pompous assery, that’s just for fun.



*Explanatory note for readers unacquainted with Mr. Knilands’s behavior: I have not, to my knowledge, ever met him, and he has not, to my knowledge, attended any of my workshops on editing. Though public information about him is sketchy, he appears to have worked for a number of newspapers in the Midwest. What is certain is that he has been formally banned from several journalistic discussion boards for his intemperate remarks. He is particularly abusive toward those who turned down his application for employment or who presumed to disagree with him or who are more prominently known in the business than he is. It is possible to entertain the opinion that he is not wired to code.

WTF

Jesse Sheidlower, the formidable lexicographer and Editor at Large of the Oxford English Dictionary, is bringing out a new edition, the third (!), of The F Word, a revised and expanded treatment of one of English’s most popular words.

For an amuse-bouche, he is offering an F Word of the Day. Here is today’s.

If your scholarship in bad words has not been updated since Ashley Montagu’s The Anatomy of Swearing (1967), here is your chance to expand your learning.

After the storm

Despite the distresses of the day, I have not lost hope that journalism will return to the importance of editing.

Much of my attention and energy over the past three decades have been devoted to upholding the importance of editing: first in developing my own mastery of the craft, in both micro- and macro-editing; in establishing and upholding high standards for my colleagues as a manager, then in hiring and training promising candidates; in spreading the word about the importance of editing to individual publications through workshops and to the industry at large as a president of the American Copy Editors Society.

It was, you may imagine, a sad occasion to post yesterday that much of that effort appears to have been futile. Editing at newspapers and magazines and publishing houses and Internet sites is much diminished, and the argument for quality has succumbed to the brutal realities of the marketplace.

Here is what one reader, “Captain Nemo,” had to say about yesterday’s post:

I think the whole quality issue is overblown. Each morning I quickly check about half dozen sources: Huffington (liberal) Drudge (conservative), NYT headlines, AOL breaking news, facebook feeds, and maybe the Post. I don't "read" these sources, I skim them rapidly to get an idea of what's going on in the world. If I see an article I like or am interested in, I bookmark it and read it later. I don't analyze the "quality." I'm moving fast. I have no time to worry about how crafty a headline is or how well the lede pulls me in. It's like going to an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet. When I'm satisfied, I stop eating. I don't think I am alone in this information consumption habit, as current print circulation data vs. Internet hit rates attest. Accuracy is now a process of simple accretion of various sources. Were 17 or 19 people shot in Baltimore over last weekend? Does that matter to the basic human guts of the story that a pregnant woman an a2-year-old girl were shot?

I suspect that the captain’s reading practices are quite common, and I doubt that they arose with the Internet age. Newspaper readers have always been notorious for scanning and skimming, and anyone who has had to deal with readers’ complaints knows how frequently those complaints came about when a reader reached a conclusion from a headline without looking at the story.

I further suspect that the captain’s indifference to errors in the details is also fairly common. The New York Times had to publish a lengthy correction about errors in Alessandra Stanley’s article on Walter Cronkite’s career — the latest examples of a pattern of sloppiness in the writer’s work that Craig Silverman examines for the Columbia Journalism Review. But most readers would almost surely slide over the errors — and shrug at seeing them pointed out. They are embarrassing to The Times, particularly to its copy desk, but not of much moment to the ordinary reader.

So, if the publisher can’t afford to spend money on editing, and if the reader doesn’t really care that the articles are as stuffed with errors of fact as Strasbourg geese are with grain, why worry?

One reason is that errors and low-grade writing have cumulative effects that readers begin to notice. As Gary Kirchherr commented on Facebook about yesterday’s post on quality, “Readers may not be willing to pay more for quality writing, but they also will abandon the publication that goes too far in the opposite direction. Rock, hard place.”
They will notice errors in articles about subjects that touch them, and they will be quickly bored with unfocused, slipshod writing.

Let me suggest a parallel. When General Motors emerged from bankruptcy this month, its CEO, Fritz Henderson, proclaimed that GM would be committed to producing “high-quality” automobiles for consumers. He didn’t say that GM had previously been manufacturing crappy products — he didn’t have to; the emphasis on “quality” spoke for itself. Degrading the product is not a sound long-term strategy.

Once journalism, print and electronic, has stabilized in a business model that no longer requires the ceaseless cuts in staff and reductions of product that have marked the past few years, it will begin to reconstruct itself. As it does so, some publishers will once again aspire to credibility and quality. Some, as always, will happily churn out junk so long as money can be made off it, but a few will seek more dignity. Some always do.

Those who so aspire will come to see that editing is indispensable and will begin to employ more editors as revenues permit. Those editors will not likely work in the structure that newspapers favored for more than a century, but whatever structure develops will take cognizance of unchanging principles:

Credibility rises from accuracy; accuracy requires checking.

Readers want clarity; clarity and focus come from editing.

Writers, who are not necessarily the best judges of their own work, benefit from a dispassionate analysis of their prose before publication.

The best writers benefit from editing; the less-accomplished require it.

Have they no decency?

My former colleague Claire Abt tells me that there were so many things wrong with this that she had to share it:

New Jim Beam Red Stag black cherry-flavored bourbon

Kentucky apple martini — a unique cherry-apple flavor:
Jim Beam Red Stag bourbon, DeKuyper red apple liquor and sweet & sour, topped with squeezes of fresh lemon
[A brief pause to permit you to shudder]

This is still the land of the free, and it ill becomes anyone to disparage another man’s tipple, but, great Caesar’s ghost, this is monstrous.

My first alcoholic drink was bourbon and Coke, but when I became a man, I put away childish things. You can mix vodka with what you will, and you’re free to imagine that you can distinguish one kind from another. Gin as well can be mixed with many things, though tonic water is one of the better and gin achieves its apotheosis when combined with a little dry vermouth. Rum seems designed to mingle with fruit juices.

But whisky and whiskey — Scotch, Irish, and bourbon — with which only brandy can compare as supreme achievements of the distiller’s craft — should be granted their dignity.

If you like your bourbon with a little something sweet, mix it with a little sweet vermouth and enjoy a Manhattan.

But bourbon flavored with black cherry and mixed with red apple liquor and sweet and sour mix? [You may shudder once more.] Good Lord, it’s enough to drive a man to drink.