Published on Show Me Mizzou April 24, 2026
Story by Chris Blose, MA ’04
“Beware the dasher who, when in doubt, dashes,” Don Ranly told me. His face displayed the kindly and slightly conspiratorial smile that appeared whenever a topic had piqued his interest.
When I heard Dr. Ranly, PhD ’76, former head of the magazine sequence at the Missouri School of Journalism, had died in November 2025, this memory stood out in a flood of many. It occurred when I was working as one of his assistants during his final semester teaching Magazine Editing in 2002.
I had just worked through a hefty pile of heavily marked-up student exercises, and we were chatting casually about personal pet peeves. My grievance concerned the overuse of em dashes. I probably made some haughty remark about nobody knowing how to use a colon or a comma anymore. Dr. Ranly, never haughty but always invested in questions of style, responded with his memorable gem of a sentence.
It stuck with me. If you’re one of the countless journalism graduates who crossed paths with him during his three decades teaching, some witticism probably stuck with you, too. Maybe you learned not only the intricacies of grammar but also an editor’s most important traits, including a “reduced thirst for glory.” Perhaps you participated in his thorough and thoughtful Vox magazine postmortems. You might still keep a printed copy of “Ranly’s Rules” in a stack with your AP Stylebook and Strunk & White. Or you took one of his philosophical courses, such as General Semantics, and you witnessed the moment his eyes shone even brighter than usual when a student came to some deep understanding in the course of classroom discussion.
To be clear, such understanding seemed more critical to his goals than mere grammatical correctness. He stood for clarity and precision, not pedantry. He wanted writers and editors to help their readers better understand the world around them. He knew that using clear, compelling language was the path to such understanding. In an era of shrinking editorial staffs, information overload and AI writing that is riddled with em dashes (I digress), that mission feels more important than ever. His legacy reflects that. In 2019, alumni and friends established the Don Ranly Magazine Scholarship, awarded to students focused on careers in the magazine business.
I think of Dr. Ranly often. I’m even breaking editorial style to include “Dr.” with his name because “Dr.” is simply his first name in my mind. Whenever a run-on sentence in a manuscript cries out for punctuation, he’s there. As I write a practical how-to story, I recall his enthusiasm for “refrigerator journalism,” even if folks don’t clip stories and place them on household appliances anymore. “The map is not the territory,” the foundational idea behind General Semantics, has grounded my own personal philosophy.
Most of all, though, I remember the smile, and the infinite well of curiosity and kindness behind it. If you were ever on the receiving end of that smile, consider yourself fortunate, and hold onto the wisdom that came with it.
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