A reader has complained that we are too sloppy at The Sun to catch and correct typos, citing these passages: "I know where you live and I am going to braek …" and "He was having an anfare."

Looks bad.

But what the reader did not take into account was that the passages were extracted from e-mail messages the article was quoting. Our practice in quoting texts is to present them as they were written, rather than correcting minor errors or making capitalization, abbreviations and other details conform to our house style.

Not all publications are scrupulous to this extent. Some also follow long-standing newspaper practice of "cleaning up" quotes. The reason for doing so is usually to spare the subjects being quoted any embarrassment. It is not a good reason, because it usually involves doing someone a favor. Yes, for example, it could be embarrassing for a quotation to reveal that a school principal doesn’t make subjects and verbs agree. But a journalist’s responsibility is to present people as they are, not as better than they are. (The latter task is the job of the press agent or spokesman.) Besides, if a school principal, or a senator, or a college president doesn’t make subjects and verbs agree, that may be something the public ought to know.

At The Sun our standard is that the words within quotation marks should be the words uttered by the speaker. This is a more complex matter than it may first appear, because spoken language is by no means easily converted into written language. What occurs is more like a transliteration from another language. Punctuation must be supplied, along with standard spelling. "Um," "uh," coughs, snorts and other nonverbal sounds are omitted.

At the same time, we do not typically indulge in phonetic spellings. Trying to represent dialect is imprecise and distracting, and it can appear that the writer is trying to make the subject look ridiculous. In Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger hit on the technique of representing the stresses and emphases of speech by italicizing individual syllables. That way lies madness.

What we aim for in quoting people is not a raw transcript, but a representation of their actual words within the conventions of standard written English. Warts and all.