Indirect quotes
A quotation may be used as either a direct quote or an indirect quote. If you use a quote, even if it's indirect rather than direct, don't mangle it. A couple of years ago, an actor doing a TV commercial for an Atlanta bank solemnly intoned something like this: ''Shakespeare said life is divided into seven stages.'' The Bard said nothing of the kind. As the copywriter would have known had he taken the trouble to look it up, Shakespeare wrote, ''All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.'' Nothing there about stages.
Indirect quotations are sometimes preferable to direct quotations. An indirect ...
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