The Text and Transcriptions

The Ellen White text for this series relies primarily on transcripts made by her secretaries under her direction and on those made after her death by the organization responsible for her literary estate.^{4Those transcribed by the Ellen G. White Estate consist of handwritten materials that had not been transcribed by Ellen White's secretaries before her death, as well as additions to the collection that have come to light since 1915. Ellen White's surviving handwritten drafts are preserved at the main office of the White Estate, where upon proper request they may be viewed for scholarly purposes.} In order to ascertain the reliability of the current transcriptions, a sampling of documents was compared against their handwritten or earliest sources. That examination confirmed that the copyists uniformly opted for what is sometimes called “expanded transcription” in order to improve the readability and clarity of the original. Thus, while remaining true to the meaning and language of the original documents, they corrected or modernized spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and verb tenses, spelled out abbreviations, and inserted paragraph indentations. They also standardized the date and place lines of each letter.1EGWLM 62.3

While an entirely new transcription retaining the grammatical idiosyncrasies and archaisms of the original documents might have been attempted for this series, several factors led to the decision to utilize the existing transcriptions. These included practical considerations such as the magnitude and prohibitive cost of retranscribing tens of thousands of manuscript pages and the fact that the current transcriptions are universally used in the many publications in which Ellen White manuscript material is found. More fundamental was the desire to present a text for the general reader that, while remaining true to the meaning and wording of the original manuscripts, was free of the distractions of grammatical imperfections and transcription apparatus. Examples of Ellen White's holographs are reproduced in this volume, enabling interested readers to compare the transcribed text with the handwritten original.1EGWLM 62.4

Words that the editors of this series inserted for clarification are enclosed in square brackets—[ ]—and extraordinarily long sentences or paragraphs in existing transcriptions have been split. Also, this edition strives for uniformity in the spelling of a place or person so as to facilitate searching in electronic formats—e.g., “Fannie” versus “Fanny.”1EGWLM 63.1

A number of the original typescripts contain interlineations penned by Ellen White. In most instances these interlineations have not been included in the text because they typically reflect a later rereading and marking of the document by Ellen White—sometimes years later—and would thus have been unknown to the original recipients. In instances in which the text has included these interlineations they appear between “greater than” and “less than” symbols: < >. So that the reader may know that an interlined copy exists for one of the documents, a plus—+—symbol has been added at the end of the introductory publication line.^{5Interlined copies may be viewed at the main office of the Ellen G. White Estate.}1EGWLM 63.2