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, September 5, 2024

It's a grand day for grammar

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 In the fifth through eighth grades, I was drilled in the traditional schoolroom grammar by two formidable ladies, Mrs. Jessie Perkins and M...
4 comments:
Monday, September 2, 2024

Ink-stained wretch has just about had enough

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  On this date in 1986 I took my seat on the copy desk of The Baltimore Sun . I had been a copy editor at The Cincinnati Enquirer  for six a...
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Monday, August 26, 2024

Whiter than white

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I've been brooding over a suggestive phrase from Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me : "people who think they are white...
1 comment:
Saturday, August 17, 2024

Punctuation ain't grammar

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The Harris and Walz nominations have generated a flurry of back-and-forth arguments online, not about their political views, but rather how ...
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Sunday, July 21, 2024

There were giants on the copy desk ...

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An anecdote from the time before I made my escape from Gannett's Cincinnati Enquirer. The Enquirer  featured a local columnist named Fra...
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Thursday, July 18, 2024

The Old Editor gets cranky in the morning

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I see some things in published journalism nearly every damned day. Just look.  Too few people today have had any experience with horses, and...
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Monday, July 8, 2024

The Old Editor vents

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Some random observations on writing and editing   As an editor, do what you can I have spent more than forty years in journalism, which priz...
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Sunday, June 23, 2024

Thoughts on an Invitation to Apply to Johns Hopkins University's Police Force

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Campus is crawling with undergraduates, half of them scurrying to the Eisenhower Library, the other half sashaying off to Charles Village ba...
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Wednesday, June 12, 2024

Learning how to talk

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I was a graduate student fifty years ago when I first heard a faculty member speak of being "politically correct," a little self-c...
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Sunday, June 9, 2024

Tell me about your worst undergraduate course

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It was half a century ago, at Michigan State University, and I had disregarded Jean Nicholas's advice to pick courses by the best profes...
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