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I hope I can make this situation as clear as possible. I am looking for
anything *in writing* that I can show our Director of Marketing about using
quotations correctly in writing.
Here's the problem. We have an outside PR firm that gathered information,
including quotations, from some of our customers so that we could write case
studies. The PR firm forwarded the info to our Director of Marketing who
then forwarded it to one of my writers. My writer wrote the case study with
the information he was given. Now the Director of Marketing is trying to
change two of the quotations. One of them he claims is a typo from the PR
firm. He wants to change the word day to the word data. I agree that in the
context of our product and in the context of the conversation, data is
probably the correct word. But we have no way to verify it. My bigger
problem is that he wants to change another quotation so that it reads
better. You know how the spoken word often looks funny in writing. The
marketing guy wants to change it so that it reads better. It won't change
the meaning of the quote, but it isn't what the person said.
Does anyone have any references for using quotations that I can give to our
marketing guy? Anything related to legal, ethical or just correct usage of
quotations would be appreciated.
