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.

Monday, June 8, 2009

My good friends

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A colleague who is considering signing up on Facebook wonders whether there might be a journalistic conflict of interest. Once in, as I am, ...
11 comments:
Saturday, June 6, 2009

The philosopher's mummy

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On this date in 1832, the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham died at the age of 44. Pursuant to his instructions, his body was preserved...
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Friday, June 5, 2009

The old order

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Thirty years ago, David Halberstam published The Powers That Be , a book on Time magazine, CBS, The Washington Post , and the Los Angeles T...
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Antique writing equipment

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This is a “Who cares?” post on a gloomy, wet weekday, so you might be well advised to skip it. Despite all the writing with Microsoft Word o...
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Thursday, June 4, 2009

Damn you, AP Stylebook

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An editor asked me yesterday what I thought about the old “split verb” rule, and I managed to cut short the rant before spittle started gath...
18 comments:
Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Why this is Wordville

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The regulars at Elizabeth Large’s restaurant blog, Dining @ Large, refer to themselves collectively as the Sandbox. Not everyone is happy wi...
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Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Wake up and smell the coffins

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David Sullivan wrote a typically thoughtful and moving account last week of what the daily newspaper has meant to its community. This is th...
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Bringing Dickens into focus

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One of the problems with Charles Dickens is that there is so much stuff. All those novels. The compelling biographical details. The Victoria...
Monday, June 1, 2009

To err is human

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Imagine, if you can, a book a copy editor would find more inviting than Joseph T. Hallinan’s Why We Make Mistakes (Broadway Books, 283 pages...
6 comments:
Saturday, May 30, 2009

Weekend miscellany

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Item: Tomorrow is the two-hundredth anniversary of the death of Joseph Haydn, and as I crouch over the computer in the basement, I’m listen...
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