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I am currently writing my English coursework to hand in tomorrow and would very much appreciate some quick help. I would like to know whether I should insert commas into a quotation to make it read better. Here is the quote:

Don’t Spy On Us is targeting UK based mass surveillance and wants to “let judges not the Home Secretary decide when spying is justified”.

Here is how I would change it:

Don’t Spy On Us is targeting UK based mass surveillance and wants “to let judges, not the Home Secretary, decide when spying is justified”.

Is this grammatically correct and if so, should I be adding commas or just remove the quotation marks and keep the commas?

Thank you in advance

InternetHobo
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useruser
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  • Are there commas in the text that you are quoting? Surely that is the criterion. – Chenmunka Mar 16 '16 at 15:02
  • No there were not, hence the reason for my query. I think now it has been resolved though. – useruser Mar 16 '16 at 15:19
  • I'd say adding commas here does not distort but does improve the quoted passage; I'd just add [tidied] after the quote to prompt readers to check accuracy for themselves. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 16 '16 at 15:46
  • @EdwinAshworth Please do not give irresponsible advice like this. You are affecting people's idea of professional academic practice. At a legal level your suggestion would amount to tampering with evidence. Academically it is simply fabrication. One may quote a source text, from a given edition, and one may then freely explain (with reasoning, obviously) what one thinks was probably really intended, and what the author and/or editor might have cocked-up. (At least a couple of footnotes in my thesis deal with this kind of problem.) You, however, are advocating quietly making things up. – Captain Cranium Mar 16 '16 at 18:01
  • @Captain Cranium I take it you insist on preservation of font and font size, double dashes as opposed to equal signs, non-substitution of other dash-like punctuation marks ... I can find 'authorities' which would allow 'Don’t Spy On Us is targeting UK based mass surveillance and wants “to let judges[,] not the Home Secretary[,] decide when spying is justified”.' – Edwin Ashworth Mar 16 '16 at 18:06
  • @EdwinAshworth I am very familiar with orthography/typography in many media, across disciplines over a considerable period of history. I am not competing with you. I am just asking you not to give casually wrong advice about good practice in citation, fidelity to sources, and duty to scholars. OP asked a fair question in good faith and deserves good guidance. Obviously I have no idea about who has supervised your postgrad research. The universities where I teach would encourage me to penalise students for grabbing a quotation and conveniently repunctuating it. I emphatically discourage that. – Captain Cranium Mar 16 '16 at 18:37
  • You need to post an attributed link to the source of “to let judges not the Home Secretary decide when spying is justified”. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 16 '16 at 20:20
  • @Captain Cranium I've taken the trouble to check further back, and it appears that “to let judges not the Home Secretary decide when spying is justified” as it stands is not from 'Don't Spy on Us' at all (the 'to' doesn't appear there) (but the commas do), but from a misquote. And here is another variant found at ifex.org: "and to let judges – not the home secretary – decide when spying is justified." This would make further debate silly; the quotation would appear more seriously infelicitous. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 16 '16 at 20:41
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because there is no attribution/link for the quote asked about; the source I've eventually found includes the commas (but omits the parallel 'to'). – Edwin Ashworth Mar 16 '16 at 20:49
  • @Edwin Ashworth "and let judges not the Home Secretary decide when spying is justified." is a direct quote from https://www.dontspyonus.org.uk/org – InternetHobo Mar 17 '16 at 15:18
  • @InternetHobo That indeed seems to be more primary than the near-identical offering in the link I found (with the commas). However "Don't Spy On Us is calling for new legislation that will make the spooks accountable to our elected representatives, put an end to mass surveillance in line with our 6 principles and let judges not the Home Secretary decide when spying is justified." is so long it would be comma-heavy with the extra pair around the parenthetical. This is one problem with quoting part-sentences: the punctuation often doesn't work as well with a fragment. // ... – Edwin Ashworth Mar 17 '16 at 15:54
  • Here, the root problem is that the original is unwieldy. A bulleted list would be much clearer. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 17 '16 at 15:56
  • I'd use "... “let judges [and] not the Home Secretary decide when spying is justified”. This is an acknowledged way to adjust a quote. See What is the proper use of {square brackets} in quotes?. And yes, I've replaced square brackets with braces here, to cope with the formatting restrictions surrounding hotlinks on ELU. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 17 '16 at 16:04
  • @InternetHobo "Don't Spy On Us is calling for a new Parliamentary Bill to make the spooks accountable to our elected representatives, to put an end to mass surveillance and let judges, not the Home Secretary, decide when spying is justified." is however a direct quote from Global Information Society Watch referring to the DSoU stance. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 17 '16 at 16:24
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    @Edwin Ashworth I wasn't trying to imply that the edits made the quote good. I was just trying to fix the problems you objected to in the question. Nor was I advocating adding bracketed commas. I was trying to let the OP know about the accepted use of edited quotations. That you should neither leave an improperly written quote unacknowledged, nor secretly edit it for readability. – InternetHobo Mar 17 '16 at 17:03
  • @InternetHobo One should also attribute and link to any quote, which lack you also fixed (and which was the close-vote reason). – Edwin Ashworth Mar 17 '16 at 17:13
  • @Edwin Ashworth I absolutely agree with you there (as long as your source is available online). I just didn't want to stray from the original question. – InternetHobo Mar 17 '16 at 17:16
  • @InternetHobo Sadly, the OP is incorrect; we need the original (or a well-constructed example stated to be such) to be able to give a sensible answer. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 17 '16 at 17:22

2 Answers2

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To quote from this page

Sic is a Latin term meaning “thus.” It is used to indicate that something incorrectly written is intentionally being left as it was in the original. Sic is usually italicized and always surrounded by brackets to indicate that it was not part of the original. Place [sic] right after the error.

Example: She wrote, “They made there [sic] beds.”

Note: The correct sentence should have been, “They made their beds.”

Why use [sic] at all? Why not just make the correction? If you are quoting material, it is generally expected that you will transcribe it exactly as it appeared in the original.

The emphasis is my own.

Community
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InternetHobo
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No. Do not ever, ever change the quotation, if you can help it, in terms of spelling, punctuation, capitalisation or anything else. Or if you really must (for clarity), show and say how and why you have done so.

Otherwise you would be distorting evidence. In your example, obviously, you are aiming for clarity. The point, however, is that you can alter the meaning of something that you present as someone else's statement, because you are only mentioning it to recruit authority.

In the end, though, it's up to you.

But while you're here... What is this thing called, Love?

Captain Cranium
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