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, April 14, 2025

The Copy Editor's Code

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 Our domain is factual accuracy, spelling, punctuation, grammar, usage, and house style, making all of them clean and correct.  We hold that...
3 comments:
Monday, March 31, 2025

Thirteen ways of looking at an editor

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 I Comma jockey, fault-finder, rule-follower, drone II "Copy editors are a necessary evil." III They make it read as if they had w...
1 comment:
Wednesday, March 26, 2025

When you speak, are you wearing brown shoes with a blue suit?

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 I have been a working editor for forty-five years, and throughout that time, to gauge from letters to publications and public diatribes, th...
1 comment:
Thursday, March 20, 2025

Get over it

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Some merry Andrew at the Associated Press Stylebook  chose to stir up the animals, in Mencken's felicitous phrase, on Facebook by postin...
5 comments:
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...
2 comments:
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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