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, June 26, 2025

Things I once taught. Please forgive me

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 Some of the things in the materials for my editing class at Loyola University Maryland over twenty-four years leave me embarrassed and repe...
5 comments:
Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Advantages of life as a copy editor

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 You get to work sitting down.  You do not have to go out in all weather to attempt to draw information from the inarticulate and the hostil...
5 comments:
Wednesday, May 28, 2025

Honor the desk

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 Three and a half years ago Kimi Yoshino came to Baltimore from Los Angeles to become the first and founding editor-in-chief of The Baltimor...
2 comments:
Tuesday, May 20, 2025

All right, all right, One More Time

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 Yesterday I made a snarky post about people who think that "who" refers only to human beings and that "that" can only r...
1 comment:
Saturday, May 10, 2025

Listen up, people

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 I tell you this with utter assurance: Every time you see peoples'  it will be wrong. Oh, all right, not every time. Just nine hundred ...
3 comments:
Saturday, May 3, 2025

In the Kentucky Diaspora

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The locust trees burst into bloom in Baltimore today, and I know that on the other side of the Appalachians they are perfuming the countrysi...
2 comments:
Sunday, April 27, 2025

The arc of decline

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I recently posted that I would sooner endure another bout of Covid than subscribe to The Baltimore Sun, which despises the city in which it ...
3 comments:
Monday, April 21, 2025

For all the saints

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 At 74, I carry quite a roster of the dead along with me, as must be the case with other septuagenarians. So many are gone: family, classmat...
3 comments:
Wednesday, April 16, 2025

Processed prose

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 Somehow things that occur are not enough in themselves but must be identified as a process. A little dip into the corpora show how common t...
1 comment:
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...
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