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.
