McIntyre's editing rules

John McIntyre, director of the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun, an affiliate faculty member at Loyola College of Maryland, and a former president of the American Copy Editors Society, pulled together a funny - and informative - list of 25 rules of editing. Here's the first five:

1. The project will require three times the planned time to achieve one-third of the desired result (McIntyre’s Ratio).
2. Writers will never straighten out it’s and its.
3. No matter how many times an article is edited or proofed, some reader will find a mistake in it.
4. To reporters, all deadlines are fungible.
5. Percentages will have been miscalculated 42 percent of the time...read the rest of the rules here.

P.S. I probably violated Rule 20 in the first sentence, but I like the way it looks.