Stop defacing quotes with brackets
slate.com
slate.com
So quoting the last clause in the above paragraph, I might write
> when the author refers to [the subject] only implicitly.
The obvious alternative is to quote a longer passage. Maybe this is one of those cases where conciseness fights with authenticity.
Another solution might be to substitute in the subject and just not indicate it with brackets. That certainly reads easier, but risks hiding a common type of misunderstanding.
Edit: All you lazy copy-paste writers downvoting all the comments here that propose paraphrasing instead of quoting: I see you.
A larger quote would still be arbitrarily cut out of a larger context. If you're extending past the good part purely to get a subject I'd even say it ends up more arbitrary.
Unless you're taking a test, you don't need to prove you understood it, and if your reader lacks confidence in your understanding then paraphrasing makes the problem worse! Instead of merely worrying you missed important context, now they have to worry you completely altered the meaning.
Paraphrasing can mangle words so easily. I'm baffled why you would imply otherwise.
And your edit just makes you look stupid.
I was tempted to reply to this by throwing etiquette out of window, but that would get me downvoted to hell. Because there is an etiquette.
> Paraphrasing can mangle words so easily. I'm baffled why you would imply otherwise.
When I paraphrase someone, they're my words. Not the original author's. I take responsibility for them.
> And your edit just makes you look stupid.
You're right down there with me. Welcome.
Frankly, implying otherwise diminishes the language.
Edit: All of which is why the article was written. People changing quotes, wrapping it in brackets so it flows better, in their view.
That's a mess!
Others here, myself included, correctly maintain appropriate bracket use does not change a quote, which is true until this garbage.
I think it’s more faithful to the original, at a slight cost of fluid readability, which is often a good trade-off of features.
There is. But "It's bad because it's bad etiquette", with no further elaboration or citation, is a pretty useless claim.
Disagree; adding context or identifying of an unusual pattern as part of the quote is common practice
> Less reason...
> Let’s [sic] your reader see...
These two points are at odds with each other - and how would my reader understand the contrast between the source and my interpretation without knowing the source?
Of course it's better to find a quote that can stand alone, but if you can't do that — say, because there's a pronoun that refers to something too far away from the phrase of interest to include — then use brackets, ellipses, and so on.
From TFA:
> Sometimes you have to use brackets anyway. Maybe the speaker or writer was using an acronym or a completely unfamiliar piece of jargon that the reader needs explained. Maybe they were referring to a person by their last name or nickname, when the reader has not yet been introduced to the person’s full name. But these changes should be both necessary and obvious.
> He said he was going to "post this on HN [Hacker News] right away."
Of course, there are often other ways to do that:
> He said he was going to "post this on HN right away," referring to the website Hacker News.
> Sometimes you have to use brackets anyway. Maybe the speaker or writer was using an acronym or a completely unfamiliar piece of jargon that the reader needs explained. Maybe they were referring to a person by their last name or nickname, when the reader has not yet been introduced to the person’s full name. But these changes should be both necessary and obvious.
Not quite explicitly, but it isn't a far leap from "referring to a person by their last name or nickname" to pronouns.
I disagree. I think interviews are critical tool of discourse!
(I'm kidding...to your point)
I think it's extra prevalent now when there is so much video media that users want to get summarized for them. It takes longer to watch a video than to read a summary from someone whose viewpoint I already align with to make a judgment about the video.
This discussion about citation/quoting/primary sources makes me recall university days when (as a student of history) I tried to cite a DVD as a source. But, the professor's required Style guide made no provisions for the media type. Thus, there was pressure to either quote from a book (either written by the person being quoted or from a secondary source quoting the person) rather than transcribing the quote from the visual source I was verifying myself: literally seeing the person I was quoting say the exact words.
"It's an older code, sir, but it checks out", the officer said, referring to the stolen access code Han had just provided, stolen from god knows where, god knows how long ago.
See, now the original quote is undisturbed and the added context is less authoritative (on purpose), since it is not inserted into the quote. The provenance of all the information is clear.
Personally I think the only brackets we should use in quotes are [sic], indicating an error in the original. Otherwise we are on the slippery slope to, "oh, what they really meant to say is [phrase phrase phrase]".
The primary usage I see of this is to replace some second or third person pronoun with the actual name of the person, which is much simpler than appending a short biography of the person and trivially easy to verify.
Spitballing:
"It is not worth doing," she said, [it=foobar].
We do this all the time in programming languages. Without introducing too much syntax, this is doable.
If you're just going to use it once, or if all usages have `[it=foobar]`, I don't think you'd do it.
I could imagine doing something like what you mention if I had moved code from another context, and I wanted to have a commit that shows plainly that it was moved verbatim. But then I'd make subsequent commit where I do the necessary substitution.
If you never pulled out code into its own separate function just in order to name some lines of code, you should give it a try. You can avoid a lot of comments and/or confusion by just structuring your code in a way that allows you to name lines of code as concepts and abstractions. No need for it to happen more than once for you to do so.
But I don't understand your point in bringing it up here.
> "It is not worth doing," she said, [it=foobar]
baz(it) = "$it is not worth doing"
baz("foobar")
Overwriting the quote makes the expression unclear, which does require readers seek original expressions or otherwise speculate.
I think back to the one period after sentence move we've seen play out for a while now.
When two spaces are used, end of sentence is a parsable thing, easily differentiated from other uses, such as abbreviations.
Without them, assistive technology gets capitalization wrong all the time.
This kind of thing makes problem spaces way larger and more complicated than they need to be.
In your second example, the quote is clear, verbatim as quotes are intended to be.
In the first example, what has been clear, precise syntax is not a matter of ambiguity.
In your example, it's somewhat clear, but inference is required to understand what was said.
The example given in the article actually does bring genuine ambiguity to what would otherwise be a precise, easily understood expression:
They may groan when Corky, denied the massive funding he’s asked for, tells the town council he’s going to “go home and bite [his] pillow,” the way I do now.
Did Corky say, "go home and bite pillow" broken English style?
Or, did Corky say something else?
Until this construct, we would know because "[his]" would be added into quote context. It would not be a modifier, essentially hiding or changing the quote.
Notably, what Corky did say isn't actually present in the expression, meaning we have to now trust the author interpreting things for us.
Breaking the line with how brackets are used is going to lead to significantly increased ambiguity, and that's going to happen because it will be employed to spin or otherwise manage far less trivial examples, and sorting it out will all take considerably more effort than it all would otherwise be, given brackets are never normally used to modify a quote itself.
And all for a bit of flow? I don't buy it. The whole affair diminishes how robust brackets are and introduced ambiguity into expression that does not add any real value.
Replacing a word breaks the syntax and brings ambiguity to some use cases involving brackets and quotes that did not have it before.
As I mentioned elsewhere, a similar thing happened with the one space vs. two spaces to end a sentence.
In that last sentence, there is now ambiguity after "vs. " where there was not before. Right now I am on desktop, but if I were to input that sentence on my Android, "two" would be auto-capitalized, even though I am mid sentence.
I see this headed a similar direction.
Cases where the actual verbatim expression may be made more clear with something added in brackets will now overlap with cases where someone wants to replace a word in a quote...
Sigh :(
So resolving the pronoun with square brackets can be less confusing, to say nothing of the benefits of brevity.
It depends on the native language. Spanish is flexible to a fault, so "a huge orange cat", "an orange huge cat", and even "a cat orange huge" are easy to understand... but correctly translating "un enorme gato naranja" to English is the hard part.
> The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase by Mark Forsyth. "Adjectives absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac."
Slippery slope arguments tend to ignore that if a result is actually unconscionable then regardless of the apparent slope we'll still actually stop somewhere. Additionally, they often could be applied just as well in reverse, indicating some sort of flaw in the reasoning: "We can no longer even substitute proper nouns into our quotations: how long is it till we can't use 'sic', and from there it's a slippery slope to not being able to fully quote people at all for fear of misrepresentation."
In this case though, what would be so bad about the use of brackets changing over time? Changes don't happen in isolation, so presumably people would adapt, recognizing that the author's interpretation probably plays a key role (much as it already does because of the author choosing the context to omit and the new home for an unsuspecting snippet).
Using them this way breaks that and renders both past and future text less clear, and does not add real value otherwise.
Real ambiguity becomes codified into otherwise precise expression.
I disagree. The point of the slippery slope argument is that no one knows where we'll stop, or if at all. We should be cautious in ever starting sliding.
As Einstein put it, "[Grammar nazis] are [really the worst]."
How ever there is a question should you take more care in writing when some of your audience has English as a second language?
As an additional device, [sic] is also helpful to indicate an original typo or improper usage not by the quoter.
You can also use those brackets to cut out unnecessary/irrelevant/extraneous words. A necessity, sometimes, and one that is easy to misuse in a way that changes message or meaning.
> Then that someone would be a dolt who does not understand the basic rules of American English punctuation. Stop catering to such a person, who I hope is strictly imaginary!
Hey now, I am one of these people, and I most definitely exist!
Editing a quote should be done with grave solemnity -- you are changing someone else's words -- and only to clarify meaning that was disturbed when you extracted the quote from its natural context. Anything else can be handled in your prose.
(I don't consider snipping or eliding to be editing the quote, unless it is done deceptively to suggest something that was not present in the original. It's just a way to, essentially, make two quotations at once.)
If what you suggest was truly necessary, wouldn't most complex dialogue in fiction be incomprehensible? Yet it isn't... unless it gets mangled. As the article's Romeo and Juliet example clearly demonstrates.
After all quoting someone at all is already an act of tearing their words out of the context they have been put in by that author.
You can misquote someone badly without brackets, while you can quote someone faithfully with brackets.
Yeah but that's almost always what's happening when you see those tiny quotes; the author is pushing a narrative and using a sound it to sell it. Particularly in political news and places like Slate..
If $Author writes: "The foundations of the notion of fluid modernity (as outlined in the previous chapters) is fundamentally the simultaneity of dichotomies".
And I quote them as: "The foundations of the notion of fluid modernity [...] is fundamentally the simultaneity of dichotomies". I am not in any way changing their intended message. The author in that case reminded their reader about something they read in the previous chapter, something my readers cannot be reminded of, unless they also read the book recently. Therefore skipping that part with an ellipsis arguably would even be in the interest of $Author, because it isn't their quote that throws my readers off without $Author's fault.
This is just one example. Another very typical case would be if I'd write about $Person and quote someone who wrote "Jules Favre traveled to Königsberg in 1871 to negotiate peace with the Prussians, where he was met with ..."
Then if I'd write in the context of my text: "[He] traveled to Königsberg in 1871 to negotiate peace with the Prussians, where he was met with ..." wouldn't this again be totally okay if it improves readability in the context of my text?
The stuff I outline here is extremely common in theoretical, philosophical or historical texts. The existence of abusive misquoting doesn't mean one cannot use brackets in a responsible and good way (and you can also misquote without brackets).
Just because a quote doesn't fit your favourite sentence may not mean that you “shouldn't be using that quote”.
Why is your third paragraph in parenthesis? Using your own logic, you should either remove that paragraph or re-write it without parenthesis.
I could go on, but it doesn't matter because I understand what you are saying. Writing is about conveying meaning in a chain of endless signifiers, "words, words, words..." On one hand, this is utterly impossible if we nitpick to hell, on the other, it's an amazing piece of technology that works because of convention, which you and the author eschew.
"Ah yes, convention, that's why we shouldn't be using brackets in quotes becau..."
...no?
Fiction (or really any prose) has context and continuity, so it doesn't need to disambiguate. Context and continuity are lost when an excerpt is lifted as a quote. Hence the usage of [brackets].
Since this is painfully obvious, I'm struggling to see what did you mean to illustrate by referring to "complex dialogue"?
I agree that in fiction or other forms of prose, that the writer should try and mold the surrounding context to fit the quote. But when I did journalism I didn't always have a lot of time to do so. If you're using quotes heavily, from a variety of sources, not all of them are going to fit -- you can either spend a long time rewriting your text until you get it right, or you can do some selective editing and preserve the flow without having to refactor your entire piece.
That said I don't have a hard rule about switching perspective. If you can make it work without bracketing quotes, great! But it's one of those things you have to handle with care, and isn't always practical. Hence, brackets.
Editorial interpolation isn't changing someone else's words, it's explicit, clearly delineated, paraphrasing.
> I don't consider snipping or eliding to be editing the quote,
It absolutely is editing, which is why it also is usually also marked by explicit editorial marks in brackets just as editorial interpolation is, except when you are snipping from the beginning or end of the quote, and even then may be marked if you aren't doing so at natural breaks in the source text.
As for interpolation, you use explicit marks to show that you've done it, and in either case it is wrong to do it to change the meaning.
Who? How do you know?
Look at it done correctly: tomc1985 objects that "[he is] one of these people, and [he] most definitely exists!"
You may not like how it looks, but it completely solves the fake issue you were making fun of.
You also need brackets around "exists" since the original quote had "exist". I think you're proving the point. I completely agree with the author that sentences like this are absolutely miserable to read. You can quote him as saying "I am one of these people, and I most definitely exist!" and, because we all have basic reading skills, we all understand that the "I" refers to the person speaking. Mangling quotes with unnecessary brackets is bad writing.
That's fair, I put too much trust in hedora's version.
> I think you're proving the point.
I may be demonstrating the article's point, that it looks awkward, but I still strongly disagree with hedora trying to make it look like the subjects get all wonky and confusing.
tomc1985 objects: "I am one of these people, and I most definitely exist!"
Who? How do you know?
The problem you’ve presented has nothing to do with brackets or changed words; the same problem is there even with the original words (as above), when the quote is given without attribution as in your example.
The higher order cost is worse!
Breaking well accepted grammar, so that it is now unclear what was actually said both in the future and for readers consuming past works, just so it flows better?
Are you quoting them, or not?
Which is it?
Seriously.
Quote is a literal expression, verbatim. Or it is a precise statement, form of contract, part of offer and acceptance.
Perhaps you intended something else?
Care to provide an example where we quote meaning?
I will read with great interest!
That's called "paraphrasing", and is distinct from quoting, because a quote is what was actually said.
For example, if you don't like:
He said, "I will go to the city."
You can use:
He said that he would go to the city.
Quotes are useful because the text they surround can be ungrammatical or even contain non-words, for example phonetically describing dialect.
To be consistent you would have to insist that words in quotes should always conform to the grammatical context. This would make many current (useful) uses of quotes incorrect.
I've seen these used a few times in the weirdest places and I just assumed the person who originally said the words mixed things up - so in the example quote given in the article I would've assumed Corky said "go home and bite pillow." (cause you know sometimes saying things outloud is messy and not precise)
It would never occur to me that the writer will replace a word in an actual quote.
I think that amounts to an assumption that the author is dishonest. If Corky's speech is broken in that he leaves out "my", the author's addition would be changing the quotation. Brackets can generally be assumed to replace tense (in single-word uses) or to paraphrase (in lengthy uses).
I disagree. The brackets are especially helpful if you quote partially and leave out parts of a paragraph and denote it with: [...]
This is probably also somewhat important in other parts of academia, where precise use of words is important. But it is critical in the legal field.
That is not even snark, the bold read, weirdly placed lines under links kept pulling my eyes in. Apparently, the author removed the (old-fashioned, but agreed upon) typographical underline for links and replaced it by border-bottom, which starts below the descender of the letters instead of the baseline. That way, they look...misaligned.
Meanwhile, I never considered the brackets in quotes confusing and found them quite helpful at times, especially when reading particularly old English which is weird enough even if correct.
Not sure what the lesson is here, but definitively entertaining.
But that's not what bracketed editorial interpolation is for, and editorial interpolation isn't, as the article (paraphrasing the AP manual) pretends, an alternative to paraphrasing, it's a mechanism of paraphrasing which makes explicit what is paraphrased and what is preserved exactly. Used well, it preserves the important parts of quote while maintain flow around paraphrases necessary to preserve meaning from context in the source that was omitted. E.g., replacing a pronoun with it's referent/antecedent when including the portion of the text that provides it in a way which preserved the relationship would require a much longer quote with more material extraneous to the purpose for which it is being quoted.
The comments about trust are kind of dumb. If I use quotes with no editorial interpolation, I ask just as much trust as I do with editorial interpolation: I could, after all, just be inventing thee quote whole cloth, or presenting it accurately but misleadingly out of its original context. The only way to be sure that I haven't misrepresented the origin, text, or sense of the quote—whether or not I have marked interpolations in it—is to check the source, both to find the quote and understand it's context.
As are the bits about exact text search: it is extremely rare that editorial interpolation will fail to leave enough unique uninterrupted text to allow an exact text search to take you to the right part of the source material if the original source is exposed to online full-text search in the first place.
Brackets are necessary to clarify context in a concise way. I doubt I'd use them in the contexts the OP means, but they are invaluable in legal writing.
----
"[Brackets for editorial insertions] are invaluable in legal writing." -torstenvl
> “[It’s] invaluable in [legalese]” —torstenvl
The first part is a shortening/paraphrasing and clearly marked as such. But you didn’t use the word legalese, but I put it in there because I like it better. And that’s wrong.
Although personally I would write something outside of the quotes to ease the reader into your direct quote, possibly using brackets or parentheses to signify cuts.
No, it doesn't.
> The standard use is, as you say, to indicate that the text is as it appeared originally,
This is the use.
> and you didn't add a typo.
It is not restricted to things which might be mistaken for typographical errors.
> The common Internet use is to indicate "This is wrong. Har har you're stupid."
It's very common, for some reason, on the internet for people to respond (usually with displaced offense on the part of the not-present author of the quote) as if the standard use had that implication, but I've literally never seen a use which elicited a response indicating that it was taken that way for which there was any reason to believe that it wasn't being used in the completely standard way. I'm not convinced that the second use actually exists.
Look at the following message from this thread. Arrow quote marker is already there, so it there'd be no reason for the [sic] in my mind.
[sic] is only ever used with marked quotes, to indicate that something the reader may see as an error is preserved exactly from the cited original, so the presence of an arrow quote marker doesn't remove a reason to use it, it is what creates the context that makes it relevant to use. It is clearly used in the standard wat.
It's true that one might see less reason to use it in a medium like HN where the source is on the same page and the usual method of quotation is cut-and-paste rather than transcription. OTOH, it's also a medium where the source can often be edited after the response is posted, which can provide an additional reason to do it.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Which-is-grammatically-correct-he-was-...
On the other hand, Commonwealth English treats "hospital" as something more like a state. You go to hospital just like you go to work.
I know online dictionaries say both are correct, but irregardless[1] it's one of those words that really irritates me.
--
[1] Yes, using that word is an attempt at written humour.
The American instinct is then to reconstruct a verb from the more common noun, and the -ize pattern fits.
I'd guess that if you asked an American, they'd say that a burglar robs.
But English is weird like that isn't it. Considering that depending on where you live you can quite correctly do things "at the weekend", "on the weekend", "in the weekend", or even "over the weekend".
Everyone on Fox news taught themselves to use this euphemism in smooth, everyday punditry. It spread very quickly.
Later, perhaps around the mid 2000s or so, there was some additional talking point added about some prominent Democrat's support for torture after 9/11. Could have been Hilary in a Senate campaign, or Obama, or possibly someone else.
I remember eagerly watching all the Fox punditry shows to see how they squared the circle. It was fascinating-- they'd ramp up using the same kind of red-hot rhetoric one would expect for labeling the "other tribe" a hypocrite. But at the climax of their take they would trip over their words, having to actively think to avoid saying "torture" and instead to use the euphemism, "extended interrogation techniques." You could just feel their brains creating all of these effective smears-- "torture apologist," "fan of torture," or whatever-- and then studdering because they couldn't use any of them without admitting what Bush authorized was indeed torture.
Does anyone have a clip of any of this? I thought it was fascinating.
Anyhow, that initial quote with brackets reminded me of that. I guess the connection is:
1. finding a solution for a narrow problem: obsessively ensuring context and syntax of a quote is always crystal clear, or making oneself feel better about supporting monstrous government crimes
2. being duct taped into a corner when you want to do the thing you care about: write compelling prose, or bark mindlessly into a television camera
Edit: use the word "crimes" instead of "misbehavior" (Damn, that euphemisic propaganda is effective!)
Is this the Mandela effect at work, or do I recall them being "Enhanced interrogation techniques"?
"house on fire!", Billy-Jo Bob shouted.
"[My] house [is] on fire!", Billy-Jo Bob shouted.
Any other usage (inside quoted text) is simply wrong.
HOWEVER:
Writer should find balance on why brackets within quotes is used in the first place. Many times, the quote itself may lose context. So in addition to a the source of the quotes, you may substitute words within the bracket.
Examples also include replacing a block of words with [...] to skip long passages for example, substitute other words to fill context for the reader.
This is an MLA notation: https://getlibraryhelp.highlands.edu/c.php?g=635153&p=451319...
I'm not convinced they would be compressing it. When you have the bandwidth for a full article, size is probably not going to be the problem, and when you don't have the bandwidth, compression is probably counterproductive.
Even a static huffman tree would help, and has no overhead. An entropy encoder would do very well and only cost a few bits to flush.
And I bet you can get more reliability out of compressing and then adding error correction bits.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code#ITA_2_and_US-TTY
There was a time before ASCII, you know...
* News wires are large old distributed networks. There may still be old equipment attached to it that natively uses this encoding; or modern software may still be using the compatible encoding because it was never practical or cost-effective to have a "flag day" to switch over.
* Even if the technical limitation has been lifted, the convention may live on as part of the folklore of the field.
https://iptc.org/standards/iptc-7901/
Perhaps the convention of a limited character set dates back to the telegraph era
However, it is not brackets alone that is an issue.
The usage is strange!
Begin excerpt:
They may groan when Corky, denied the massive funding he’s asked for, tells the town council he’s going to “go home and bite [his] pillow,” the way I do now.
End excerpt.
The quote with brackets in it appears functionally equivalent to:
"go home and bite my [his] pillow."
I agree with the author here, and would add calling out the brackets alone is not enough.
There are well accepted and clear uses of brackets in quotes that are lumped in with this arguably, dubious construct.
I read the article title and thought, "Well, no. Is this some purist argument or other?"
Turns out it is not!
Standard bracket use is not in question. Not even mentioned. Normal bracket use does not change a quote at all, when done properly.
The bracket use the author is bringing to our attention DOES.
Go ahead, take a closer look at the full excerpt. Why did they do that?
About the only reason I can find for doing it appears to be a potential misunderstanding between "my pillow", as would be quoted, and the ending statement, "The way I do now."
Why?
The quotes clearly assign "my pillow" to Corky, as opposed to the writer, who post quote says, "I do now", but that is not good enough, apparently.
I would call this being too clear at others expense, as well as an insult to the reader, who is likely to wonder just why "[his]" got put in there.
Did Corky really tell the town council, "go home and bite pillow" broken English style? Of course not, so why bother with the use of a context or clarification device used to muddy both? Edit: Even worse is the case where Corky actually did speak broken English style, which is now rendered a matter of ambiguity because someone thought muddying up the language would help their prose be more clear!
Agree with author on this one.
That bracket abuse, and I am going to call it as I see it here, appears to be quite pretentious, while also adding nothing of value and considerable confusion!
(At least one example given in the article is incorrect usage, but the basic principle is normal and widely used.)
> "go home and bite my [his] pillow."
To me makes way more sense. If I was to read "go home and bite [his] pillow." I would assume the person being quoted had said ""go home and bite pillow." which makes almost no sense.
Brackets do not modify the quote at all. Subtract them, and the original expression is intact, verbatim.
I am quite sure you can show me one too, and the point being this isn't in broad use just yet. Should not be.
Frankly, this reminds me of the one space after sentence mess. Similar reasons have been given. It reads better! It flows better! You get the idea here.
But, ever notice how often your mobile device gets capitalization wrong?
This is why!
The same people who thought cleaning up that one space made sense did not think through the parsing implications. One space means we no longer have a way to differentiate an end to a sentence from an abbreviation.
That nice, clean space has already cost untold human hours spent on hobbled user input. Your phone literally has no way to capitalize in a more effective, assistive way. (same goes for any code assistant depending on that information, which is lost in the one space after sentence scenario.)
Here we have a similar thing. If the brackets are allowed to overwrite quoted material, then we lose the ability to differentiate some of how brackets are used, which means we've made our language and grammar more ambiguous, and for what?
The example given in the article highlights this perfectly!
Given the use: go home and bite [his] pillow
Did Corky say, "go home and bite pillow" , or was something else said, and if something else was said, what was it, and why was it not simply quoted?
Further Esquire is not an acadmic journal so should probably conform to a more widerly used understanding of how quotes are recorded/put in context.
If we adhere to the syntax, the reader will be led to believe the person quoted said something they did not, and further, said it in a way that required clarity in brackets.
Neither are true.
Accepting this use muddies and accepted and precise syntax.
No, a set of brackets is a sign of respect for the original author who didn't spell their statement to match the writer's situation.
Any change to a quote that isn't clearly indicated would make me very, very suspicious whether the writer is misrepresenting what the original author said.
Coincidentally, I'm a German native speaker :D
Reminded me if this funny quote: "I hate people who generalise; like, all white middle-class heterosexual men, for example."
Could have been the deadpan nature of the joke, or maybe it's just because I'm tired. Maybe it's because people correcting things badly because they fundamentally don't understand them is a pet peeve.
But maybe also because I don't recognise top-posted quotes as being part of the body of a work. Some how, my brain slots it into its own little area "this is simply context you need to know to understand the author's statement - not something the author wanted to communicate directly to you" - so by the time I had finished reading the quote, and the commentary on the quote, I had forgotten what the quote actually says.
I wonder if that's an argument for re-voicing square brackets - it forces you to read the quote in the voice of the author, maybe then my brain would treat the comment as a whole.
Personally I use “(…)” to signify cuts, or “[word]” to include a word missing in the quote, but is necessary to avoid the language being annoying to read. I would never dream of changing words in a quote to fit my own text.
For example, in Scocca’s first specimen, how do we know he’s referring to the use of square brackets, or if the square brackets that appear are his own interpolation? The context makes it clear, but in other places it might not be.
If you're quoting a quote directly from a secondary source (like a 'news' article), and that quote has bracketed content, you should retain the bracketed interpretation and cite the secondary source (as the source of the quoteed material) along with the original source themself (as the source of the unbracketed material).
If you suspect the interpretation isn't accurate, you will need to do some digging to either reach out to the reporter to obtain the recording of the original source, or just reach out to the original source themselves in order to hear the same information first hand (which is probably best any way since you could be able to discuss the interpetation with the source directly).
If you don't have the time or will power to do all of that digging, then you're relegated to retaining the bracketed interpretated language and citing both the secondary and original sources since the quoted language is now a hybrid of ideas from both sources, delineated by brackets.
Brackets clarify a quote by providing necessary context, and are clearly marked as an alteration. Editing a word to a different word, or intentionally misspelling a word when the quote was not misspelled is actively dishonest.
Dare I say the one who doesn't want to be educated is the insecure one, because he can't stand being reminded of requiring education.
What I really would like to see stopped is using curly quotes or apostrophes.
Aaaand that’s enough of that article.
"cry into [his] pillow."
Did they really say, "cry into pillow?"
No?
Why is the quote incorrect?
Was that really necessary?
In such cases, is there a different style (perhaps different brackets?) to indicate an insertion rather than a substitution?
It's classic narrative fabrication to paraphrase bs and use tiny mangled quotes to sell it.
I’d assume that kind of thing is important in journalism.
But it is ugly. I just think that changing the text without indicating a change, or adding a bunch of text to establish context, is uglier.
Another issue is that they are obliged to help their audience understand a topic, so paraphrasing, contextualizing, and clarifying are important.
Personally, I think that a quote should, indeed, be posted “whole,” but, if that is not done, then brackets (or something like it) should be used.
If it is posted “whole,” then it generally needs to have context established for the quote.
I prefer “whole,” myself, with context, but I am also rather...prolix. Journalists tend to put a premium on being concise. They usually have a word limit on articles.
It’s certainly not something I’m losing any sleep over. My mother was a scientific editor, and her bugaboo was dangling participles. That kind of thing can cause problems in scientific writing, but, in some cases, might make prose easier to read. I tend to "bend" the rules of "proper English," myself. It can be fun, watching pedant heads explode.
There was another link someone around here posted, where the author was complaining about how major news organizations were not posting their corrections in a visible manner.