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.

Thursday, March 9, 2023

Copy editors see things many readers don't notice

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We of the obscure craft see many things, large and small. Here is a recent sampling.  Item:  A flag flying half-mast . Uh-uh. A flag is only...
5 comments:
Saturday, March 4, 2023

Reminders for National Grammar Day

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There are many Englishes, and each of its dialects is valid for communication among its users.   Standard written English is not the One Tru...
2 comments:
Friday, March 3, 2023

Grammar Noir: The Old Editor grilled

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I was at the bar sipping an afternoon boulevardier when some rando came in and asked, “Are you the Old Editor?” When I owned the soft impeac...
3 comments:
Monday, February 27, 2023

The question

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Gather around, children, and let the Old Editor tell you a story from the Before Times about how copy editing is more than messing with comm...
2 comments:
Thursday, February 16, 2023

What to do with all those young people

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 Recently the Associated Press Stylebook  issued guidance to avoid using the  with nouns referring to groups of people, such as "the me...
Thursday, February 9, 2023

The name of the game: You Can't Win

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 A colleague laments: "Copy editing is not a job for the fainthearted. You catch and fix hundreds of typos and grammatical mistakes eve...
8 comments:
Friday, January 20, 2023

The foggy, foggy "due"

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Perhaps you were taught, as I was, to cringe when due to  is used as a preposition, viz., Due to unfounded objections by twentieth-century c...
2 comments:
Sunday, January 15, 2023

A weekend with the dead

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One of the drawbacks of becoming a septuagenarian is the number of people who have climbed the golden staircase before you.  I've been r...
1 comment:
Saturday, January 7, 2023

Yeah, I read books

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 As a child, a nearsighted teacher's pet allergic to sports, I was, of course, a bookworm, and reading has sustained me these past sixty...
Wednesday, January 4, 2023

Speaking American

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One hundred and four years ago, H.L Mencken published the first edition of The American Language , arguing that this nation had developed a ...
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