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 15, 2009

There, there

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When editors and writers and teachers who don’t know what they are talking about inveigh against “ passive voice ,” one of the things they c...
6 comments:
Sunday, June 14, 2009

Want to buy a used newspaper?

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A few days ago, Baltimore Brew posted a short article on the possibility that a federal bankruptcy court might take management of the Tribun...
4 comments:
Saturday, June 13, 2009

This is not a passive construction

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Once more, with feeling. My arm has not wearied from hacking away at the weedy growth of bad advice on grammar, whether it is the superstiti...
2 comments:
Friday, June 12, 2009

Friday roundup

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Item: A reader* inquired whether I used sex in the headline for a post just to lure readers. Of course I did. The point of a headline is t...
12 comments:
Thursday, June 11, 2009

Newspapers have no sex

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A reader, apparently mistaking me for the Answer Man, has written to ask my views on personification, saying that she has been challenged on...
11 comments:

The Greeks started it

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As with so much else in Western culture, the cult of the celebrity — its degenerate state deplored in yesterday’s post, “Who cares about Ash...
5 comments:
Wednesday, June 10, 2009

That Jay Hancock can write up a storm

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Unaccustomed as I am to praise of writers’ work — hey, I was a copy editor, a fault-finder; they didn’t pay me a princely sum to coo over th...
3 comments:

Who cares about Ashton Kutcher?

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Not to pick particularly on Mr. Kutcher, who portrayed a dolt on a television series and later became the incumbent husband of Demi Moore, b...
9 comments:
Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Omnium gatherum

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The title is mock-Latin for a miscellany — omnium , all, combined with gather them — and a tipoff that this post is not devoted to a single ...
10 comments:
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:
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