John E. McIntyre is the night content production supervisor at the Baltimore Sun and author of the blog You Don’t Say at Baltimoresun.com. A former president of the American Copy Editors Society, he teaches editing at Loyola University Maryland.

Here are a few of the insights that he provides in The Old Editor Says: Maxims for Writing and Editing:

o If you can’t tell me in one sentence what your story says, you don’t know what your story says.

o Reading other people’s raw copy is like looking at your grandmother naked.

o If you are your own editor, you’re working without a net.

o You can try writing drunk, but you have to edit sober.

o You should have learned ethics by the second grade. Don’t copy. Don’t tell lies.

o I don’t buy on spec.

o Catch nine errors, no one sees. Let the tenth go by; people will ask if you’ve ever been in college.

o Do I have a tattoo on my forehead that says, “Waste my time”?

o “The crowd doesn’t care about the windup. The crowd wants to see the pitch.

o “Giving a writer a thesaurus is like giving a toddler a shotgun.”

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John Early McIntyre has been a working editor for more than forty years, first at The Cincinnati Enquirer and since 1986 at The Baltimore Sun. He has been at the desk most Saturday nights since 1980.

At The Sun he works on the news desk and writes a blog called “You Don’t Say.”

He has terrorized undergraduates at Loyola University Maryland in the editing course since 1995.

He was originally, of course, an English major, as an undergraduate at Michigan State and a graduate student at Syracuse. The taint lingers.

Growing up in Eastern Kentucky, he was first exposed to journalism during six summers in high school and college, working for the weekly Flemingsburg Gazette.

He favors bow ties, bourbon, the music of Haydn, murder mysteries, strong coffee, history and biography, draft beer, country ham and salt-rising bread, laden bookshelves, and writers who have the common decency to acknowledge that they profit from an editor’s assistance.