It’s that easy for the folks at Testy Copy Editors to dismiss missives posted at The Poynter Institute’s site. Choice zinger of the morning:
- Myth No. 6 about short writing: Poynter’s “senior scholars” know something about the subject.
Speaking of the TCEs, they also discussed whether quotes should be cleaned up. While we’re on the subject, Nicole Stockdale drums into our thick heads: Quotes are sacred. I realize it’s naive to think every quote that comes across your computer screen is an exact representation of what the source said. Reporters who don’t use tape recorders have to resort to memory to fill in the parts of sentences they missed while taking notes, so quotes taken this way will never be totally accurate. But: Every time we change a quote, we make it a little bit less like what the person actually said, and that’s reason enough to leave quotes alone.
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