Apart from necessary omissions and interpolations, your quotations should always be exact, and any departures from the original should be clearly indicated with ellipses or brackets. Sometimes, though, you may have to quote...
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Apart from necessary omissions and interpolations, your quotations should always be exact, and any departures from the original should be clearly indicated with ellipses or brackets. Sometimes, though, you may have to quote something that looks downright wrong. In these cases, it's traditional to signal to your readers that the oddities are really in the original, and not your mistake. The signal is "[sic]": square brackets for an interpolation, and the Latin word sic, "thus, this way." (Since it's a foreign word, it's always in italics; since it's a whole word and not an abbreviation, it gets no period.) It amounts to saying, "It really is this way, so don't blame me." George Eliot was a woman: if someone you quote gets it wrong, as in "George Eliot's late fiction shows major advances over his earlier works," you might signal it thus: "George Eliot's late fiction shows major advances over his [sic] earlier works." Old spellings were often variable: if your source spells the name Shakspear, you might point out with a [sic] that it really appears that way in the original. Don't use sic to show off with gotchas. Too many writers sic sics on the authors they quote just to show they spotted a trivial error. If your audience is unlikely to be confused, don't draw attention to minor booboos. [Entry added 3 November 2000.]
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