You Don't Say

John McIntyre, whom James Wolcott called "the Dave Brubeck of the art and craft of copy editing," writes on language, editing, journalism, and random topics. Identifying his errors relieves him of the burden of omniscience. Write to jemcintyre@gmail.com, befriend at Facebook, or follow at Twitter: @johnemcintyre. His original "You Don't Say" blog at The Baltimore Sun ran from 2005 to 2021, and posts on it can sometimes be found at baltimoresun.com through Google searches.

Thursday, March 12, 2026

On the porch

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 In yesterday's unseasonable warmth I spent part of the afternoon on the porch, reading The Private Patient  (P.D. James's final Ada...
4 comments:
Friday, March 6, 2026

Yes, it's a quibble, but dammit

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 Let me be clear. I do not want to disparage Karen Hao, to whose Empire of AI  I have turned for information on the despicable tech bros who...
10 comments:
Wednesday, March 4, 2026

O Day of Grammar, draw nigh

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 On a weekday afternoon in a quiet bar, a glass of Smithwick's is one of the benisons of retirement. I was pondering a second pint when ...
Monday, February 16, 2026

One of the best

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 Last week I lost a friend of forty years.  Steve Auerweck died Friday at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, where he was being treated f...
17 comments:
Friday, February 13, 2026

How you say it

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 When you are supplying attribution to a direct quote, it's best to follow two simple patterns. The first: If the attribution is a name ...
8 comments:
Monday, February 2, 2026

It happened in February

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Groundhog Day, Candlemas, Valentine's Day, Super Bowl, and Presidents Day are not the February days I find most important.  It was on th...
9 comments:
Friday, January 30, 2026

You have your crotchets, and I have mine

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 We all have opinions, and many of them are about words or constructions that we dislike intensely.* But I, as a professional editor, must k...
2 comments:
Sunday, January 4, 2026

What an editor needs from a writer

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 As an undergraduate I aimed to become a writer of fiction. Experience proved that I lack imagination. But for nonfiction prose--articles, l...
4 comments:
Friday, January 2, 2026

I do say

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 Coming up in the new year: In February, when I turn seventy-five, I will mark forty-six years since The Cincinnati Enquirer  offered me a p...
4 comments:
Thursday, December 4, 2025

Yeah, "the real story"

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 An essay by Joan Didion in 1968 pointed out a fundamental problem with standard American journalism: "It is a comment on our press con...
7 comments:
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