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.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

An unbearable scene

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It was one of the editors I hired who, a while back, made sure that you did not read a description of a homicide as a grizzly scene . A griz...
5 comments:
Monday, May 11, 2009

The world didn't end in 1970

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Many of you will have recognized the title of yesterday’s post, “Teach your children well,” as an allusion to the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and ...
11 comments:

Dammit, Jim, I'm a journalist, not a Trekkie

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Regret the Error is, for a journalist, a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I site. Craig Silverman collects corrections from print and Web ...
7 comments:
Sunday, May 10, 2009

Teach your children well

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Mem Fox, teacher and writer of children’s books, says this about her twin vocations in Radical Reflections : Those who write well have more ...
4 comments:
Saturday, May 9, 2009

Talk retro to me

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This one is for the Young People, if any such lurk among my readers. Are you mystified by the peculiar turns of speech when Baby Boomers tal...
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The other place and this one

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Now that You Don’t Say is no longer a working blog at Baltimoresun.com , it is not listed at that site’s main page. But it will continue to ...
4 comments:
Friday, May 8, 2009

Watch where you sit

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A recent Baltimore Sun article contained a sentence saying that federal proceedings supercede local judgments . So they do, but the word is...
4 comments:
Thursday, May 7, 2009

Look over at Blogs.com

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By invitation, I offered Blogs.com a list of my top ten blogs on language and editing — a selection that should not astonish anyone who has ...
1 comment:

Puzzling possessives

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A few days ago a reader wondered about the construction pork producers’ and Israelis’ objecting to . Why apostrophes? The use of a possessiv...
4 comments:
Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Presented without comment

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An Irish student inserts a bogus quotation in the Wikipedia entry for a recently deceased French composer —“to show how journalists use the ...
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