Comments on: Housekeeping notes

By: Laura

Laura — Fri, 11 May 2007 18:08:54 +0000

As I am among the world's sloppiest bloggers, and will freely (if somewhat shame-facedly) admit it, I generally applaud your decision. I'm still inclined to use square brackets when I change anything, even a capital letter, but I blame that all on my mother, who was working on an edition of Life on the Mississippi when she was pregnant with me. I spent many hours in utero listening to debates about whether Twain meant a comma or a semi-colon, and whether he meant school house, school-house, or schoolhouse, and it must have rubbed off on me.

By: walt

walt — Thu, 10 May 2007 17:02:40 +0000

Iris, thanks. Maybe I’ll stop being scrupulous about [C]aps. No, definitely I’ll stop…

I’m going just a bit beyond Chicago in changing the few grammatical errors I notice…but I’m in the spirit.

Hmm. I have a copy of Chicago Manual of Style at home–needed it when I was editing LITA Newsletter–but never really thought to look it up. Thanks! And, hey, you’re a librarian: That’s a good thing.

By: Iris

Iris — Thu, 10 May 2007 16:58:26 +0000

Actually, according to the Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition) there are six “Permissible Changes” that authors can make to quoted text (section 11.8). The second permissible change is that “the initial letter may be changed to a capital or lowercase letter” and you only need to call attention to this if you are using the “Rigorous Method” of quoting.

The fifth permissible change is as follows: “Obvious typographic errors may be corrected silently (without comment or sic; see 11.69) unless the passage quoted is from an older work or a manuscript source where idiosyncrasies of spelling are generally preserved. If spelling and punctuation are modernized or altered for clarity, readers must be so informed in a note, in a preface, or elsewhere.”

Section 11.69 referenced above simply says where to place those sic indications.

All this is just to say, go right ahead. Even the Chicago Manual of Style agrees that readability is important.

And all this leads to one more revelation… I can’t believe I just went and looked up all this stuff. Somebody save me from myself!