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, May 13, 2024

Asked and answered

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More in comments on "Ask me anything" : We'll start with the semicolon. 1. What's an easy way to remember the proper times...
Saturday, May 11, 2024

Of course it was about commas

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 When I invited readers earlier today to ask me any question they care to about writing, editing, or English usage, this was the first to a...

Ask me anything

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It’s my own fault.  When The New York Times called to ask for my views on the sale of The Baltimore Sun to David Smith and Armstrong Willi...
6 comments:
Saturday, May 4, 2024

Prosy verse

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 Fifty years ago I imagined that I might be a poet, but when Syracuse University turned me down for the creative writing program, then calle...
3 comments:
Saturday, April 27, 2024

Bemoan, bemoan, bemoan

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My Facebook feed has been cluttered this week with people posting this remark attributed to the late Joseph Sobran: "In 100 years we ha...
2 comments:
Monday, April 22, 2024

Not unusual

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 It has been the custom of the editors of the Associated Press Stylebook  to announce their annual revisions at the national conference of A...
Monday, April 15, 2024

Not during the reign of Edward Longshanks

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A fellow editor writes to ask if I, as a resident of Baltimore, can attest that there has been a Roman Catholic presence in the city since t...
1 comment:
Wednesday, April 3, 2024

Once a bookworm, always a bookworm

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An old friend asked me on Facebook if I could recommend some nonfiction books, so I put together a list of the ones I've liked most in t...
6 comments:
Wednesday, March 27, 2024

In the beginning was a word

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Imagine a collection of short detective stories in which no case is solved.  I was four pages into Anatoly Liberman’s discussion of the orig...
6 comments:
Monday, March 4, 2024

The practice of lexis can lead to tsuris

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 Once you hang up the green eyeshade, nobody pays you any longer for finding fault and you have to think up other things to do. Sometimes, o...
5 comments:
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