Check out this great post from the Ediket blog on Quotation Rules and formatting.
So you want to include a quotation, but the tense in the quoted material doesn’t match what you’re writing. Or perhaps something like this happens: “I want to explain to you how the book said ‘reading will change them.’ ” Suppose the original line in the book said, “People often find that experiences from reading will change them,” but you want to explain to your friend that reading may change him or her directly (the “you” being explained to). You can see now where the nested quote came from, but the pronoun “them” doesn’t match with the pronoun “you” from the longer quotation and the intended meaning is not expressed. Quotations are supposed to show exactly what the original source said, but isn’t there any way to fix this?
This is part of a series on quotations: check the first article for basic info or see the third article for…
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