More in comments on "Ask me anything" : We'll start with the semicolon. 1. What's an easy way to remember the proper times to use a semicolon versus a period? 2. When are sentences in parenth...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/05/asked-and-answered.html
When I invited readers earlier today to ask me any question they care to about writing, editing, or English usage, this was the first to arrive: "Commas before 'too,' 'as well,' 'either,' etc....
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/05/of-course-it-was-about-commas.html
It’s my own fault. When The New York Times called to ask for my views on the sale of The Baltimore Sun to David Smith and Armstrong Williams, I was less than enthusiastic.* When Mr. William...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/05/ask-me-anything.html
Fifty years ago I imagined that I might be a poet, but when Syracuse University turned me down for the creative writing program, then called to offer me a fellowship in the academic program in ...
My Facebook feed has been cluttered this week with people posting this remark attributed to the late Joseph Sobran: "In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high schools to tea...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/04/bemoan-bemoan-bemoan.html
It has been the custom of the editors of the Associated Press Stylebook to announce their annual revisions at the national conference of ACES: The Society for Editing, presumably because those...
A fellow editor writes to ask if I, as a resident of Baltimore, can attest that there has been a Roman Catholic presence in the city since the latter part of the 13th century. He refers to an...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/04/not-during-reign-of-edward-longshanks.html
An old friend asked me on Facebook if I could recommend some nonfiction books, so I put together a list of the ones I've liked most in two and a half years of retirement: Isabel Wilkinson, ...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/04/once-bookworm-always-bookworm.html
Imagine a collection of short detective stories in which no case is solved. I was four pages into Anatoly Liberman’s discussion of the origin of the word finger — including multiple Germa...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/03/in-beginning-was-word.html
Once you hang up the green eyeshade, nobody pays you any longer for finding fault and you have to think up other things to do. Sometimes, on afternoons before the bar opens, you go to the libra...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-practice-of-lexis-can-lead-to-tsuris.html
Making my way through the thousand pages of The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium by Anthony Kaldellis, professor of classics at the University of Chicago, and published by the Oxford Uni...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/02/language-sneaks-up-on-you.html
February 8 marked forty-four years since I began work as a copy editor. The Cincinnati Enquirer took a risk in hiring a fugitive graduate student for the copy desk, where I absorbed the pr...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/02/my-life-as-drudge.html
The following text is an article on U.S. involvement in Kosovo during the Clinton administration, compiled by an editor at The Baltimore Sun from the Associated Press, Reuters, and The New York...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/02/so-you-want-to-be-editor.html
Today Kathleen baked sour cream cookies from my grandmother's recipe. They were the great treat of my childhood, the batter alone tasting better than any other cookie batter I have sampled. I h...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/02/cookies-you-need-cookies.html
Yesterday Armstrong Williams, co-owner of The Baltimore Sun, deplored the singing of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" at the Super Bowl: "It is an anthem created for one race, and one race only. Playi...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/02/um-about-that-anthem.html
Language is the most democratic thing we have: Each English speaker gets one vote, and the language becomes what we collectively make of it over time. Some people do have influence, but it is...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/02/nothings-more-democratic-than-english.html
The reputation of editors, particularly copy editors, has not been enviable. There is a long tradition of writers affecting to believe that if we were only rid of these petty, pedantic, literal-m...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-editors-hand.html
For more than thirty-seven years, thirty-three of them on the staff, I have been a daily subscriber to The Baltimore Sun. The announcement that the newspaper has been purchased by a conservativ...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/01/i-subscribe-to-baltimore-sun-for-now.html
It was the 1990s. I was chief of the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun. One day a senior editor came into my office, closed the door, and sat down. "What's up?" I asked. He said, " is comp...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-plot-against-copy-desk.html
We know, because we have looked at the internet, that few people can write effectively, and we also know that all human beings are prone to error. Engaging an editor compensates for this state of...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/01/yeah-you-probably-need-editor.html
Editors are human beings, though you may have been told otherwise, as susceptible to idiosyncratic preferences about language as anyone else. Even the most scrupulous can be tempted to impose a c...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/01/editor-control-your-crotchets.html
Despite having vigorously defended the work of copy editors for decades, I concede that not all that we were called upon to perform had the best effect. Here's a recollection. When I began wo...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2023/12/a-chronicle-of-time-wasted.html
On Thanksgiving I posted that Kathleen had made my mother's corn pudding as one of the side dishes at dinner, and a couple of people asked for the recipe. Here it is. MARIAN EARLY MCINTYRE'S ...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2023/11/you-can-still-make-corn-pudding-for.html
A couple of weeks ago I posted "Give up the ship," in which I argued to abandon, or at least consider abandoning, a handful of long-established usage rules. One reader commented, "My teaching...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2023/11/let-unlearning-be-unconfined.html
That monosyllable go turns out to contribute to highly expressive phrases. It can mean to cooperate, as when one goes along or goes with the flow. That is, to use another idiom, to follow t...
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2023/11/where-things-go.html