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Should I or can I edit my clients testimonials to make them more grammatically correct?
Am I allowed to use snippets of them, rather than the entire thing?
Or am I better not to edit them at all?
I would never change them drastically to make myself look better than they are making me out to be.
What are people's thoughts on this? Have you done it yourself?
This is more of an ethics based question.
This answer is based upon my 20 years experience of having legal departments review testimonials and approve/refuse edits. I am not a lawyer though. Almost every piece I design has many, many testimonials and they almost always go through that company's legal department for review. So, while I'm not a lawyer myself, I've gotten familiar with what I can and can't do with respect to testimonials.
For testimonials, generally no, you should not edit when possible.
Testimonials are unlike other text. For legal reasons, what is reproduced must very closely resemble what was actually submitted.
You may also want to consider the fact that some grammatical errors and non-standard usage may actually lend to the credibility of the testimonials themselves. People, in general, don't write casually using absolute proper English. So, it's not absolutely necessary to stick to proper English when reproducing casual conversation.
"It has been great!" ----> "[Company] has been great!"
or
"He taught me alot!" ----> "[Joe] taught me alot" (yes grammatical error was left as is)
"The savings have unbelievable!" ----> "The savings have [been] unbelievable!"
"The savigns have been unbeleivable!" --> "The savings have been unbelievable!"
"My cat, Snowball, hates winter. She likes to play in the leave in Autumn though. This product was fantastic at reducing her hairballs!" --> "This product was fantastic at reducing hairballs!"
Removing innocuous, unimportant, unrelated bits is generally okay. but anything which directly refers to the company/product/service should generally be left as is.
You should be aware that some legal departments have had issues with overly "cherry-picking" testimonials. Don't eliminate actual testimonial text that may be less than "wonderful" for the product/service if it's then followed by something you do wish to include. The intent of the testimonial should often remain. Again, this can also lend to the credibility of the testimonial itself.
If you are overly concerned with an unintelligible testimonial, it's best to either not use that testimonial, or have a legal department review the changes you wish to make.
Testimonials are quotes and putting words into someone else's mouth can be haphazard and problematic. You should strive to leave things as they are quoted as much as possible. It is not unheard of for a someone to see their name being used as a testimonial and be unhappy with how the intent of their quote has been changed.
For example...
"I signed up for SubscriptionB last year. I hate this company! All they do is steal from me. I wish I knew they existed years ago. Then I'd have a benchmark to avoid!"
could be edited down to
"I signed up for Subscription B last year. I wish I knew [Company] existed years ago."
Which completely changes the intent of the quote... and can get you/the company into a lot of trouble.
In my world, for my clients, the clients have to retain the original testimonial letter/email/video/whatever for comparison. And I have worked with companies in the past where the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reviewed testimonials. So, when comparing the original quote to what was reproduced, it should always be clear that they are essentially the same quote and not overly edited to meet a sales goal.
I have worked as programmer a couple of years in a translation and copywriting studio and to make orthographic and grammatical corrections to any text, citation, speeches or quoting was mandatory. The guideline was that is totally unacceptable to produce any publishable text that contains such errors.
The story that someone can sue you because you did grammatical or orthographic correction (without changing the meaning) on any text is totally ridiculous, is a nonsense, is like if someone sue you because you take away some dirt from the road leaving it clean, or like if you fix a bug in a script.
I am having a hard time to believe that any honest competent lawyer will want to assist you wanting to sue another because he corrected your mispelled writing.
When I find really ugly texts or errors in the texts that the client gives to me, I always correct them (limited to my mother tongue) and then I inform the client that I made the corrections. Usually they are fine with it.
Even for testimonials, as long as you don't change the actual meaning and you only correct the typos or wrong verbs, it is fine, for three reasons:
I also understand completely what Scott says that testimonials are people's direct quotes, but IMHO it is good to correct and properly format even the direct quotes, not changing anything of the exact meaning, in a global view of the good quality of the project, respecting the testimonials themselves, the company and the user experience.
