What If We Make a New Convention?

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I have always figured that I only need to mention if I add something to a quote: otherwise, what I put in my text was in the quote. So, with actual words, if I added them, I put them in square brackets: otherwise, you can assume I found them there.

Can't we do the same thing with italics? If I don't mention I added them, there they were. Why do we need to specify both "Emphasis added" and "Emphasis in original"?

Comments

  1. Anonymous10:48 PM

    You should just adopt this and stick with it. If the convention is a specification in either case, yet you don't provide a specification, the reader will wonder what the lack of a specification means (after all, there are only two possibilities: it was there in the first place or it wasn't). The most logical solution is that a lack of a specification means that the italics were in the original.

    I never realized the convention was that you had to provide a specification in either case. Being blissfully ignorant, I've always done it the way you wanted to! And I think laziness might encourage a tendency toward adopting this method if people simply start doing it.

    -Bharat

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