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Monday, May 12, 2014

What's wrong with this opening paragraph in a New York Times blog post?

When a copy editor gets to work on an article for The Times, it doesn’t matter what section its for, the guiding principal is the same one new doctors embrace when they take the Hipocratic Oath: First do no harm.

As soon as I finished reading this intro, written by a copy editor at one of the world's greatest newspapers, I was left dumbstruck. I had caught a glaring error. And I was all set to shoot off a stinker via the comments section.

Thank goodness I decided to read on before I made a fool of myself.

Why, you ask? Check out the clever and instructive "Times Insider" post by Eric Nagourney here: "The Copy Desk: The End of the Gauntlet (or Is It ‘Gantlet’?)".

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