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, June 10, 2022

The accidental editor

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I did not come readily to my life's work.  As a student at Fleming County High School in Eastern Kentucky, I thought, being a bookworm g...
3 comments:
Wednesday, May 18, 2022

Ten Reminders

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 When you are on social media, remember that your classmates who were dim then are probably not appreciably brighter today.  Your project wi...
2 comments:
Tuesday, May 10, 2022

Take a breath. The wells of English are not defiled.

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 Someone raised a question today at an online grammar site, "Why is correct grammar a lost art?" and damme, I am heading down a we...
5 comments:
Sunday, May 1, 2022

You are entitled to ignore bogus usage distinctions

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 Earlier today a colleague posted on Facebook about the entitled/titled  distinction, that entitled  must only be used in the sense of ...
5 comments:
Friday, April 29, 2022

Hands off the books

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 Books were not plentiful in Elizaville, the tobacco-farming town in Kentucky where I grew up. Most people did not have shelves and shelves ...
2 comments:
Friday, April 22, 2022

Copy desks rise, fall

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 As a tyro on the copy desk of The Cincinnati Enquirer  in 1980, I entered a scorned subculture.  At many U.S. newspapers the copy desk func...
1 comment:
Saturday, March 12, 2022

The Sun turns on H.L. Mencken

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 When on February 18 The Baltimore Sun published an apology for its history of racial prejudice , its editorial board took a swipe at H.L. M...
2 comments:
Monday, March 7, 2022

Two warm days, before the cold returns

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 Yesterday, on a walk with Kathleen and a neighbor, we passed a house with a yard full of crocuses to which bees were giving their attention...

To correct and serve

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 For many years at The Baltimore Sun  my hands were the ones through which corrections moved into the paper.  Errors of fact, either identif...
1 comment:
Friday, March 4, 2022

Corpora Punishment: A Grammar Noir Tale

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Part 1: An editor walks into a bar The day was leaking sunlight all over Baltimore at three o'clock, but that was not doing me any good...
6 comments:
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