I’m sick of you’re [sic]

Tarek Amr
1 min readJun 24, 2023

When quoting one another, writes have, what appears to be honest yet annoying, tradition of copying a quote as it is.

This sounds like the virtuous approach to take, until the readers start encountering those, out of place, square brackets.

[T]he dog was following it’s [sic] ball, as if their [sic] inseparable.

Look at that

  • The first letter of the sentence was not capitalized, but I am too honest to capitalize it with signaling what I have just done by using square brackets around it.
  • The original author cannot tell the difference between its and it’s, nor they’re and their, so I have to shame them with [sic] .
  • The reader enjoys being confused, so I added all these decorations and misspellings just for fun.

If you ask me, I would say if you ever quote me and encounter a typo, just do me and your readers a favor and fix it.

As far as I know, given all the silly people on the internet, no one has ever complained about a capitalized letter or a fixed typo.

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Tarek Amr
Tarek Amr

Written by Tarek Amr

I write about what machines can learn from data, what humans can learn from machines, and what businesses can learn from all three.

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