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, November 13, 2023

Where things go

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That monosyllable go  turns out to contribute to highly expressive phrases.  It can mean to cooperate, as when one goes along  or goes with ...
6 comments:
Monday, November 6, 2023

Baltimore: The Greatest City in America

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 In 1986, when we moved to Baltimore so that I could begin work on The Sun 's copy desk, we rented an apartment in Towson while we looke...
4 comments:
Thursday, November 2, 2023

Don't dispute refute

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I grumped this morning about that article that used refuted  in a context plainly indicating that the sense was "disputed" or ...
1 comment:
Wednesday, November 1, 2023

Give up the ship

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 During more than forty years as a copy editor, part of my job was to make copy clean and correct. Another part of the job was to determine ...
6 comments:
Friday, September 22, 2023

The printed word

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 I have been a subscriber to The Baltimore Sun , a seven-day-a-week print subscriber, for thirty-seven years, since I began working on its c...
6 comments:
Wednesday, September 13, 2023

What he said

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 Journalists, ever citing people's speech and documents, are rightfully fond of the word said . It is plain, straightforward, unobtrusiv...
Sunday, September 3, 2023

On-the-job learning

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 I have allowed a significant date to pass unremarked. On August 17, fifty years ago, I worked my last day at the Flemingsburg Gazette befor...
1 comment:
Sunday, August 27, 2023

We used to read the stuff before publication

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When I retired two years ago from The Baltimore Sun  after more than three decades of service as an editor, I swore a mighty oath that I wou...
2 comments:
Thursday, July 13, 2023

Shootings first, questions after

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 The recent violence at the Brooklyn Homes housing project in Baltimore, in which two people were fatally shot and 28 wounded, is being comm...
1 comment:
Monday, July 10, 2023

Yeah, you're not alone

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You are writing a story about someone, let's call them X, who has a problem. X has a medical condition and cannot find or afford treatme...
5 comments:
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