Quote Checker

Forking ‘John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) checked against MLA’ by Dennis Hackethal

Paste the original text and your quote. The result updates as you type. Quoting from a web page? Try the bookmarklet.

1Original

Accurately reproduce the original text. Don’t change it – copy/pasting works best. Retain inline formatting by using markdown syntax.
Where is the original text from? Provide a link or, when quoting from a book, provide at least the author and title. The more information the better.

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2Quote

Quote the original. Do not use any surrounding quotation marks. If you are reusing a pre-existing quote, don’t change it; follow the guidelines given for the original text.
If you are reusing a pre-existing quote, provide a source. Again, the more information the better.
The rules to judge the quote by. APA and MLA let a quote start and end in the middle of the original without an ellipsis, and APA lets its first letter change case. The in-house rules, this site’s own, want every change marked.
Used for omissions. The default is ‘[...]’, but ‘. . .’ and variations thereof are also commonly used. If you are reusing a pre-existing quote, reflect its use of ellipsis.
Tick this if your quote adds emphasis, eg *italics*, and you say so where you use it, eg in the citation. With APA, write ‘[emphasis added]’ in the quote instead, right after the emphasized words.

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Advanced settings

You can adjust how the texts are compared. Odds are you don’t need to.

/ /m
A Ruby regular expression determining what is considered a diffable chunk. Defaults to . for individual characters. Use \w+ to compare whole words instead.
Pick the algorithm that generates the most semantic diff for your purposes. Myers often works best. Different algorithms sometimes produce the same results.

3Result

Please note: limitations of this tool