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, January 30, 2025

AP is not the boss of you

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 Benjamin Dreyer levels his impressive scorn at the Associated Press for its decision to go along with Donald Trump's renaming of the Gu...
2 comments:
Friday, January 24, 2025

Gone paperless

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My grandparents subscribed to the Lexington Herald-Leader , which was not much of a newspaper before the Knight-Ridder purchase, but as a ch...
9 comments:
Monday, January 6, 2025

Sunset at last

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 Last year I canceled my subscriptions to The New York Times  and The Washington Post  over their inexcusable coverage of President Biden an...
14 comments:
Sunday, January 5, 2025

Where your wits end

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I see people writing that something has occurred at someone's wit's end .  No.  "Wit" is your "talent at banter or pe...
2 comments:
Monday, December 9, 2024

Ave atque vale, Paula Froke

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 Over time the Associated Press Stylebook  acquired quite a number of barnacles on the hull. In recent years its chief editor, Paula Froke, ...
3 comments:
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:
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