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.

Wednesday, March 12, 2025

May I suggest

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Three years ago, when The Baltimore Banner  was considering taking me on as a freelance copy editor, the editors sent me a series of article...
3 comments:
Tuesday, March 4, 2025

All the news that prints to fit, a Grammar Noir episode

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 I was back at work, part-time, at the Clarion Bugle , just a few hours a week. Yeah, I quit the paragraph game, but it's bourbon money....
3 comments:
Saturday, February 15, 2025

Bookworm's progress

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Earlier this month I wrote about my interest in history in the third grade , an interest that has continued, as you'll see from this lis...
3 comments:
Friday, February 14, 2025

Dash it all

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 There's some kind of mild uproar online over the use of the em dash, which is supposedly prevalent in AI texts, and it has produced ine...
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Saturday, February 8, 2025

Sweet Old Bob

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About this time forty-five years ago I was apprenticing myself to the copy desk at The Cincinnati Enquirer , in hopes of a permanent berth. ...
1 comment:
Wednesday, February 5, 2025

A moment in history

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 When I was in the third grade at Elizaville Elementary School, the third and fourth grades shared a classroom, and Mrs. Marian Gulley alter...
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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...
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