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, February 7, 2022

Not rusting out

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 Since retiring in June I have been attending to household chores, cooking chicken for the cat, and reading books by the dozen. But the itch...
Monday, January 31, 2022

Call the pressroom

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 You've seen it. A reporter dashes in to a busy newsroom with a hot scoop, and a crusty old editor picks up a phone, usually a candlesti...
4 comments:
Saturday, January 29, 2022

Knowing your ass from a hole in the wall

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Tweeted and posted yesterday: Let me just say that a breach is where you have broken through the wall and a breech is where your ass is. You...
1 comment:
Friday, January 28, 2022

When education is not one of your community values

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 The McMinn County School Board, which removed the Holocaust graphic novel Maus  from its schools , evidently employs someone able to write ...
1 comment:
Tuesday, January 11, 2022

It's over

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 A recent online discussion of English usage turned into a tussle concerning the use of over  in the sense of more than , a molehill on whic...
5 comments:
Tuesday, January 4, 2022

In the beginning

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I growled today at spotting "new initiatives" in an article. (Growling in the morning while reading the news exerts the lungs and ...
2 comments:
Sunday, January 2, 2022

A far, far better thing

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 The next time the Associated Press Stylebook  looks to clean the cobwebs in the attic, the editors might want to take another look at farth...
2 comments:
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:
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