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.

Friday, December 31, 2021

Journalists' resolves

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 Can  you ... Write about a person's death from cancer without using "a long battle with"? Describe X, a person  whose situati...
2 comments:
Friday, December 17, 2021

I'm an editor and I'm OK

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 An editor boasts that in a single shift I: Item:  Eliminated a sentence-ending preposition. Item:  Changed like  to such as .  Item:   Gave...
1 comment:
Tuesday, December 14, 2021

Listen up, people

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 There, awaiting my morning grumble, in the middle of an Associated Press article on the recent tornadoes: "crews recovered pieces of p...
4 comments:
Monday, November 29, 2021

Decline, fall

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 Someone has seen fit to post on Facebook a statement by the late Joseph Sobran: "In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Gre...
2 comments:
Wednesday, November 24, 2021

Just the phatics, ma'am

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When I expressed dissatisfaction recently with what I called "phatic journalism," a few people quite reasonably asked what the hel...
1 comment:
Thursday, November 11, 2021

Wasted words

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 You would do your readers a courtesy to omit from your writing some of the words tediously overused in journalism.  Battle  "Politics,...
8 comments:
Monday, November 8, 2021

The misterectomy

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 When I joined The Baltimore Sun  in 1986, the paper, seeing itself as a country cousin of The New York Times , used honorifics in its news ...
Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Work history

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 In 1968, when I was a junior in high school, Lowell Denton invited me to work for the summer at the Flemingsburg Gazette , the weekly newsp...
4 comments:
Friday, October 22, 2021

Get to the point already

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Imagine that your reader is a middle-aged man sitting in a recliner. He has a beer in one hand and the TV remote in the other. The amount of...
Wednesday, October 20, 2021

For what

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I see this opening sentence in an article published by CNN: "GOP Rep. Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska, who was recently indicted for conce...
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