Editing Quotations for Style, Rule 1: Don’t

In what seems to be an obsession with consistency taken to extreme, writers and editors continue to ask the CMOS Q&A whether it’s OK to edit quotations from published works “for consistency” with Chicago (or MLA or AP) style.

Let me try to understand why someone would want to do that.

Is it a fear that even though quotation marks make it crystal clear that a text is being copied from a different source—that is, by a different writer, publisher, editor, and perhaps from a different time zone or even century—readers will be surprised and offended that it wasn’t somehow miraculously copyedited according to the same style sheet as the current document?

Is it a personal tic, like a need to match one’s handbag and shoes, or like buying a painting that goes with the sofa?

Is it a belief that some hallowed goal of “consistency” can justify changing someone else’s published writing?

Quotations must retain the original styling. Think what would happen to scholarship if everyone who quoted an original text felt free to tweak the capitalization, change a few commas to semicolons, and impose British spellings—each quoter in a different way. Remember that old game called Telephone?

Scholarly integrity aside, capitalization and spellings are personal things, and sometimes political or religious. Someone writing about God does not want you changing he to He or vice versa.

When you mess with a quote, at best you misrepresent the writer; at worst, you introduce inconsistencies yourself. It’s unprofessional and unethical, if not criminal.

It’s possible that this drive to tidy up quotations from sources that failed to follow your style book is an overly eager extension of the accepted practice of changing the capitalization of book and article titles so they are consistent throughout a document. But titles of works are entirely different. Editors don’t always have access to the original in order to check the casing. Even if they do, titles often appear in all caps or in more than one way between the book cover, the title page, and the Library of Congress listing, not to mention in reviews or at online bookstores. Standardizing titles is a long-standing convention. It’s not personal.

One of the first tenets of editing is to render quotations accurately, following the original. If you are a writer or editor and are still confused about that, please seek some informed leadership. Take a class. Hire an intellectual property rights lawyer to give a workshop. Read The Chicago Manual of Style, chapter 13. Read Amy Einsohn’s The Copyeditor’s Handbook, chapter 8. Read The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, chapter 6.

If you still have questions, well, there’s always the Q&A.

Comments

[Elegantfowl]

Ah, to quote you on the subject of quotations is sweet, as you state the following: 'One of the first tenets of editing is to render quotations accurately, following the original.'

I couldn't agree more. I presume, however, that your next post will deal with a thorny problem, that is, what is this 'original', and how do we know it when we see it?