In the last few months, Dennis Hackethal did an extensive review of my writing and wrote a large amount about me. One thing he did was look for misquotes. His attitude to misquotes has similarities to mine. It looks like he may have been inspired by me, but he doesn't credit me and he's pedantic in ways I disagree with.
If I misquoted, I'd want to know. But I'm happy to report he was unable to find a single error in my quotations.
I thought I was doing a good job with my quotations, even in informal contexts, but it's nice for an independent third party to spend unpaid hours validating this. And he's hostile towards me, so I'm not worried that he's holding back criticism to be nice. However, a potential source of error for the review is that he doesn't understand misquotes very well (see below); maybe a smarter reviewer would have found errors.
He claimed to have found errors for 15 quotes and called my results "terrible", but none are actually errors. For each quote, he presented specific information about what errors he's alleging. He didn't claim that I got a single word wrong. Instead, he was pedantic.
Most of the "... misquotes ..." are just that I often don't put an ellipsis at the start or end of a quote (see how weird it looks earlier in this sentence?). That's an intentional style choice which is widely used. Style guides have varied guidelines about this topic, but I don't know of any that agree with Hackethal's view that you always need starting and ending ellipses when quotes start or end mid-sentence. Those ellipses are commonly discouraged. His website recommends following style guides, seemingly unaware that they disagree with him.
To be thorough, here are more details covering all the other alleged errors. Sometimes emails or PDFs have mid-sentence line breaks which I fix. Also, I once clearly labelled a quote of song lyrics as abridged and linked the full lyrics, but he's calling that an error because I didn't individually indicate every abridgment within the quote. And once, when writing in plain text, I didn't include italics in a quote because that isn't supported by the plain text format. I was writing an email to people who I expected to be unfamiliar with internet norms and modern technology, and I wanted to keep it short and avoid confusing them, so I did it that way on purpose. Also, I quoted a dictionary as saying "the" when on the dictionary's website it says "The" with a capital letter. I copy/pasted my quote from the Mac Dictionary app, which has a lower case letter; I didn't change the capitalization.
So the review of my use of quotations didn't find any mistakes, only intentional style choices (mostly omitting ellipses at the start or end of quotes).
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