Quote Exactly
If your original source includes an error, you must include that error in the quoted text. You will note that the word "show" is misspelled on the note card referring to a passage in Christina George's "Lost Gardens of the Ridges."1 Because this is a direct quote, the researcher was obligated to reproduce it here exactly as it was printed in the original source.
Note that it is generally better to paraphrase the original author than it is to reproduce a grammatical error, typo, or so forth.
If you must quote the portion of the text that includes the error, you may include "[sic]" where the error occurs to alert your reader that the mistake is not yours. For example, if you included the Christina George passage in your paper, you would write it like this:
"Photographs from the early part of this century sow [sic] gliding rowboats cutting through a Impressionist-inspired landscape of water lilies."
Sometimes, when you are using original sources or historical texts, there are many so many errors that to put "[sic]" by each one would be too distracting. In these cases, you can make a note in your text that quotations are reproduced exactly as they appeared in the original.
1This article is no longer available on-line. Because web pages do change and are subject to link rot, it is a good idea to print out any web pages you use in your research.
