Should You Change Capitalization When Quoting Social Media Posts?
Let’s say you’re writing an article or blog post about audience perception of the new 2021 Dune film starring Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet. You want to get some current fan perspectives from Twitter, so you find the perfect quote. It has no punctuation or capitalization, but it perfectly encapsulates the excitement surrounding the movie that you wish to capture. If you are publishing the quote online, you or the publisher can simply embed the tweet without worrying about formatting. However, what should you do if you need to include the tweet within the body of your text, as a quote?
Tweets, Instagram posts, and Facebook posts often don’t comply with standard English grammar rules for structure, capitalization, and even punctuation. Social media has developed its own kind of literacy, one which can effectively communicate ideas using abbreviations, memes, and pieces of punctuation that only make sense on places like Twitter and Instagram. A lack of punctuation or capitalization, for instance, can indicate the excitement of the social media user. However, these different rules can become quite a headache when embedding the post in a document that generally follows the expected rules of English grammar.
For instance, I recently edited a work that included an Instagram post by Ariana Grande, published after the passing of Mac Miller. The original post doesn’t capitalize any standalone I’s within the text. The author who used the quote in their work changed the post to include all capital I’s, following the normal grammar rules and matching the rest of the text, so the paragraph read something like:
Grande posted on her Instagram, “I adored you from the day I met you when I was nineteen and I always will. I can’t believe you aren’t here anymore. I really can’t wrap my head around it. We talked about this. So many times. I’m so mad, I’m so sad…”
After looking back at the original quote and doing some digging, including querying my Facebook group Editor’s Association of Earth, I realized that change might not be a viable option, especially without any sort of acknowledgment. If you add or take out a word in a quote, you need to indicate it with brackets or ellipses, but what about changing capitalization? Based on their advice and my interpretation of the Chicago style guide (see the section below), which allows for changes to quote for readability and aesthetics only, I suggested keeping the capitalization consistent with the original Instagram post, making it read:
Grande posted on her Instagram, “I adored you from the day i met you when i was nineteen and i always will. i can’t believe you aren’t here anymore. i really can’t wrap my head around it. we talked about this. so many times. i’m so mad, i’m so sad…”
Although the gut reaction is that this must be an error, it seems that, outside of freely changing the capitalization of the first letter, the rest of the quote should be left as it is. What do you think? Did I make the right call? Should I have changed the capitalization and added a note? Let me know in the comments!
Style Guidelines: Chicago and APA
Chicago: (13.7) “For a writer or editor to copyedit a quotation in order to make it ‘consistent’ with the rest of the document or with other quotations is editorial heresy. Spelling, punctuation (other than the styling mentioned above), capitalization, and emphasis should be preserved, or the changes should be acknowledged in a note.”
APA: “The first letter of the first word in a quotation may be changed to an uppercase or a lowercase letter to fit the context of the sentence in which the quotation appears.”
