Talk:J. F. A. McManus

Section "Civil Rights Advocacy" (quote from Congressional Record)
I have a question about quotation marks and quoting a written source. My confusion lies between a convention I was taught, and the fact that the written source does not follow that convention. The question is: should one add quotation marks to make the writing clearer? Or should one leave the quoted text exactly as it was printed, even though it could be misperceived? Any useful comments are welcome.

Here are the details:

This text is from the United States Congressional Record, 1999 June 22, when a Mrs. Jones of Ohio spoke before the House concerning Dr. Middleton H. Lambright; I have pasted it here from an online version of the Record: "He believed in taking chances and seeking new opportunities. In 1971, he was offered and accepted a position as Dean and Associate Professor of Surgery in the College of Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina. He was quoted as saying: My father would have been extremely pleased to know that his son had been invited to join the staff and faculty of an institution he could not have hoped to enter in any capacity. He was speaking to the racial segregation in the State of South Carolina."

After reading this text a couple of times in the article, I realized that Dr. Lambright's words end with the word "capacity." I added single-quote marks to the text to more clearly distinguish his words from Mrs. Jones' words. In the article, that paragraph now appears this way:

"He believed in taking chances and seeking new opportunities. In 1971, he was offered and accepted a position as Dean and Associate Professor of Surgery in the College of Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina. He was quoted as saying: ‘My father would have been extremely pleased to know that his son had been invited to join the staff and faculty of an institution he could not have hoped to enter in any capacity.’ He was speaking to the racial segregation in the State of South Carolina."

So now I am asking, is this the correct thing to have done? — SWWrightTalk 09:11, 27 April 2007 (UTC)