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.

Saturday, November 23, 2024

False precision

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The 1986 edition of The Associated Press Stylebook  from my first year on the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun  remains on my shelves as an hi...
5 comments:
Saturday, November 16, 2024

Ordinary time

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Braced for the tide from Washington about to sweep over us, here on Plymouth Road in Baltimore we are sustaining as much of a humane life as...
1 comment:
Friday, November 15, 2024

Murder most fair

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 Edmund Wilson famously, and crankily, asked who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd. But I, over forty years of working with professional journa...
19 comments:
Thursday, November 14, 2024

What I know that you can know

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 Over the years, first blogging at The Baltimore Sun   and now here, I've presented much of what I know about editing. Perhaps you would...
3 comments:
Monday, November 11, 2024

The craft, not the owner

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 For journalists, at least the good ones, the commitment has been to the craft, the truth-telling, not to the ownership.  For forty years, I...
5 comments:
Monday, November 4, 2024

Stop it. Just stop it.

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You may recall Tom Lehrer's catchy Christmas song: "Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens, / Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens, / ...
4 comments:
Sunday, November 3, 2024

For "whom," the bell tolls

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 A colleague wrote to inquire about a construction in a George Will column in The Washington Post : "whomever wins." I did not rea...
6 comments:
Sunday, October 27, 2024

I celebrate my multiple failures

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 In 1969 I was full of youthful promise.  I graduated from Fleming County High School in Flemingsburg, Kentucky, an honor student and co-val...
2 comments:
Saturday, October 26, 2024

Everyone their own editor

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Editing comes with two problems: It takes time, and it costs money. And copy editing, which piles editing on editing, doubles the problem. M...
Thursday, October 17, 2024

Words for editors

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Today's offering is selections from my commonplace book, some of which you may want to post above your desk or, if you do cross stitch, ...
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