PROFESSOR: Hi. This video is an overview of editing quotes with brackets and ellipses. And these are two tools that you can use to help integrate your quotes more smoothly. So first, we'll talk about brackets. 

You can see the image there. They're like square parentheses. And brackets let you make minor changes to a quote's wording. For example, if my first attempt at integrating the quote was this, it says, "When Rosaura is handing out the cake, Rosaura remembered a story." 

And this isn't great because I've repeated Rosaura's name. That's not really naturally the way that I talk. So maybe I want to change that second Rosaura to she to make it sound a little bit better. 

So I can use brackets to do that. And all I do is take out the original word, Rosaura, replace it with "she" inside brackets. And now my sentence is a lot clearer. And I would read it aloud to check. "When Rosaura is handing out the cake, she remembered a story." And that sounds perfect. 

So this is a trickier use of brackets. So it's trickier because my example here is not just basic quote integration. This is actually pulling out a smaller quote and putting it in the middle of a sentence. And that is more often going to make you need to use brackets. 

So what I have here for my first attempt of integration is "Rosaura proudly states that my mother doesn't sell anything in a shop when the girl with the bow gets confused about the meaning of employee." So there are actually two problems with this. The more minor problem, which we're going to fix first, is that we don't want this capital letter in the middle of the sentence because the way that I've integrated this is basically just the words should fit in with my sentence. So it doesn't make sense to have that capital letter there. 

So that was my first version of changing this, was to take out the capital M, replace it with a lowercase m with brackets around it to show that I have changed that m. And you'll notice the brackets are just around the m, because it's just the letter that's changed. It's not the word. 

But the problem with this is that if I am writing this, as a writer, what I have said is "Rosaura proudly states that my mother doesn't sell anything in a shop." But in fact, Rosaura is not talking about my mother. Rosaura is talking about her mother. So I want to change that pronoun. 

So here's what I would actually put in my paragraph. "Rosaura proudly states that her mother doesn't sell anything in a shop. All right, on to ellipses. 

So an ellipsis lets you remove words from a quote. You most often will use these in the middle of a quote if you have some text that you want to include, and then you want to skip something, and then go on to something else. 

A really good example of when you would want to use an ellipsis is when you're quoting dialogue that has something like "She said," in the middle. So for this quote, I have my lead in phrase, which is "The girl with the bow says," and then I have the words from the story. "That's not being friends, she said. Do you go to school together?" 

And this sounds really weird because I've started with my lead in, "The girl with the bow says" and then I have another "she said" in the beginning. And that gets-- sorry, in the middle, and then that gets repetitive. So I'm going to use the ellipsis to take out that, "she said" from the middle. 

So now it reads a lot smoother. The quote is just, "That's not being friends. Do you go to school together?" And you'll notice here that I still kept the single quotes. 

So in this first one, we close the single quotes because she stopped talking, and then open them again. Here, we still close the single quotes and open them again so it's clear that what was taken out is that little dialogue tag of "she said." 

All right. Last slide is a common error with both brackets and ellipses. And it's really common that people will start trying to change up a quote with brackets, or an ellipsis, and will just go so far that their entire quote is brackets and ellipses. 

So if you look at this, the unchanged example at the beginning, this is all brackets and ellipses. I changed, basically, everything to the point that it's not really even used-- it's not even really worthwhile having that whole thing as a quote. 

So what I would do to fix this is pick out what language I want to include, and then just integrate that smoothly into my own words. So I can just add context and details and things in my own words and then just quote whatever is important. 

So here's my version here. "Rosaura's mother does not believe that Luciana and Rosaura are friends. She asks Rosaura, you know what you are to them? And then answers her own question, informing her that she is the maid's daughter. That's what." 

So I picked out two pieces of the language that I wanted to include and then I put my own words around them so that I'm integrating it more smoothly without having tons of brackets and ellipses. All right, that's it. Thanks for listening.