Editorial Method

Editorial Method

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The following procedures for quoted material began to be implemented in December 2001.

Pages previously added to the site may not follow these procedures consistently. I will update them as time permits—and as visitors draw my attention to them.

Note that critical editions of most works such as The Papers of Joseph Smith, An American Prophet, Early Mormon Documents, Wilford Woodruff's Journal, and Lucy's Book tend—to varying degrees—to be more literal. For the sake of consistency and readabilty, quotations from such works and from primary sources are rendered according to the standards outlined below. Note, however, that other important works such as the History of the Church, Far West Record and Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt have used less stringent guidelines, so complete consistency cannot be expected.

Paragraphing	Additional paragraph breaks are added to quoted material for readability. In such cases, ¶ marks original paragraph breaks.
Punctuation	Extraneous punctuation is removed.
	Punction is added or changed for readability except in cases where the meaning is ambiguous.
Spelling	Original spelling is retained except misspellings articles, prepositions, or conjunctions, which are silently corrected.
	Where every letter cannot be clearly deciphered words are assumed to be spelled as the writer normally spells the word or with standard spelling.
Ampersands	Ampersands are rendered as and, though &c. is retained.
Capitalization	Capitalization is the editor's except the first word of a sentence and personal names are always capitalized.
Names	The spelling and capitalization of names is standardized.
Doubled words	Inadvertantly doubled words, such as the the (usually at the end of one line and the beginning of the next) are silently corrected.
Cancelled words	Crossed out words that indicate a change in the writer's intention are enclosed in braces. For example, "who will not {return} repent." Words or letters that are crossed out due to misspellings are omitted.
Inserted words	Texted added by the editor interlinearly are enclosed in slashes. For example, "which maketh intersesion for us day and knight /with gronings that cannot be uttered/."
Omitted words	Text added by the editor to make sense of the text is enclosed in brackets. For example, "party of traiders over took [us] who were direct from Santifee, and "since I have been here [Hull, England]."
Dubious words	A question mark indicates part of the word is missing or inconsistent with the apparent spelling. For example, "Brother Russell & myself [went?] on the packet." If part of the word is missing or could be either of two words, a slash separates possible readings: "Also of the Presiden[t/cy?] who presided over us."
Missing / illegible text	Missing and indecipherable text is represented by one hyphen for each word in brackets.
Page numbers	Page numbers of quoted text are inclosed in brackets. For example, [2] indicates the beginning of the second page of a document. If the source is a published work, such as The Papers of Joseph Smith, the page numbers refers to that volume, not to the original manuscript.
Typescripts	Some text, identified as typescripts, are rendered more literally than specifed above: punctuation and capitalization is not changed (although dots will be rendered as commas where appropriate), non-standard spelling of names is retained, ampersands (&) are retained, doubled words are retained, dubious words are rendered with a dot (.) for each character that cannot be distinguished, all canceled words and letters are retained, etc.
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