We will be posting articles with examples in order to teach about various technical aspects of writing. These articles will include quotes from what we have been editing.

The use of ellipsis (...) in a quote could mean that the author actually used an ellipsis in that place, but it is also used to indicate that a part of the sentence or paragraph being quoted has been removed for the purposes of shortening it. For example, I might write "Little Miss Muffet sat... eating her curds and whey", while the full version is obviously "Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet eating her curds and whey". If a part of the sentence or paragraph isn't important to the point we're trying to make in the article, we might cut it down this way.

The use of brackets ([ ]) is used to indicate that changes were made to the quote. We do this because we don't want to waste time pointing out errors unrelated to the point that we're making in the article. For example, if we're talking about word choice, we don't want to stop and explain that the quote we used also missed a comma. Instead, we'll just use [,] to add the comma to the quote where it needs to be. Since we're trying to show correct writing, we don't want to have any uncorrected errors in our articles besides the ones that we are pointing out.

We hope this clarifies things!