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, August 18, 2009

An editor's haiku

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The coffee is hot, my hands poised above the text, its vitals exposed Regard the comma, apt with the compound sentence, not with compound ve...
13 comments:

Best of Baltimore?

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I tried to contribute today to the City Paper ’s Best of Baltimore 2009 reader poll , mainly to nominate Elizabeth Large’s Dining@Large as t...
3 comments:
Monday, August 17, 2009

The tale of the gnome

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In the old days, when copy editors left newspaper one by one, instead of being pushed down a chute with a man holding a sledgehammer standin...
6 comments:

Credulity and skepticism

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Fans (I am one) of Snopes.com , the “searchable database of urban legends and myths, email hoaxes, computer virus warnings, and folklore,” c...
12 comments:
Saturday, August 15, 2009

I wasn't at Woodstock

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Few things in journalism bear as strong a sense of inevitability as the anniversary story. Point a writer to an event, ten, twenty, twenty-f...
8 comments:
Friday, August 14, 2009

Evaluating copy editors

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If you happen to oversee copy editors, one of our nation’s fast-dwindling resources, you might be interested in some suggestions on how to e...
3 comments:
Tuesday, August 11, 2009

You too can be Montesquieu

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Waiting at the Evergreen coffee house on Cold Spring Lane for a friend to arrive, I picked up from the discarded books available on the shel...

Those whom the union protects

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Last week, when I argued that the mores of newspapers protect stars and incompetents, a number of responses in public comments and private m...
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Sunday, August 9, 2009

Half of Samuel Johnson

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Every few decades we are invited to rediscover Samuel Johnson — Joseph Wood Krutch’s biography in 1944, Walter Jackson Bate’s in 1977, and n...
2 comments:

Episcopal talk

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That you’re not in church this Sunday morning does not mean that you escape ecclesiastical subjects. Religion, like science or law, is treac...
25 comments:
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