notes-improvementsToEnglish-impreciseQuoting

for the most part i believe that one should quote exactly, however there are some exceptions, mostly involving punctuation; if:

you must alter the quoted text in order to make it more clear, stopping the quote, inserting a clarification, then starting the quote can be hard to read, and the medium you are writing in can make it inconvenient to include special characters or formatting to indicate the insertion; in these cases, just use parentheses for the insertion, even though this introduces the ambiguity of whether the original had parens. Eg "(Jane) went to the park" -- Bob

the original contains formatting or characters that are inconvenient to write in your medium; for example, in the markup i am currently using, square brackets have a special meaning, so if i was quoting something with square brackets in it, i would usually replace them with parens (without noting that i did so)

you are adding or removing formatting or punctuation. i dont consider it necessary to write things such as 'my italics' except when the context makes it important to keep track of such things (for example, if you are quoting a political opponent, and the italicization would, in some people's eyes, turn an innocent statement into an offensive one, then you must say 'my italics')

you are adding or removing whitespace. For example, often the quote spans multiple paragraphs in the source, but you don't want it to break the flow/take up so much room in your text. So remove the paragraph breaks. i dont consider it necessary to say that you did this.

you are eliding words but adding a ton of '...'s would make the result hard to read, and the result without the ... merely removes information but does not misconstrue the source (as above, typically you dont need to note that you did this, but in some contexts that would be unacceptable, such as when you are doing this to make a political opponent look bad)

you are eliding or adding or rearranging or reinflecting/reconjugating/redeclining words for flow or grammar or ordering but not meaning; "Although not widely accepted in linguistics, the term preverb is used in Caucasian (including all three families: Northwest Caucasian, Northeast Caucasian and Kartvelian), Caddoan, Athabaskan, and Algonquian linguistics to describe certain elements prefixed to verbs. In the context of Indo-European languages this term is usually used for separable verb prefixes." can be quoted as "preverb...not widely accepted in linguistics...describes certain elements prefixed to verbs" (the 'although' was elided without a ... at the beginning; the sentence has been reordered; 'describe' was re-inflected/re-conjugated by replacing it with 'describes')