This does not address the primary way I (ab?)use these brackets: to fill in the subject explicitly when the original author refers to it only implicitly.
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.
I think this is addressed in the following section:
> 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 was more pointing towards the second half about expanding a nickname or last name into a full name, but I think they're actually closely related as different ways in which the author might be adding context that is missing from the quote.
There is a way to do that by adding context outside the quote but keep the quote verbatim.
"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]".
But now you’ve basically doubled or tripled the length of the whole sentence.
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.
I've had this hit me directly with a serious sting. A company in which I was employed became subject of a state investigation, and the local newspaper wrote a story about the problem including a quote from a state investigator something like this: "They definitely have a problem (with XYZ)." XYZ was done in my department. The state investigator had made no mention of XYZ. The reporter had simply clarified the quote erroneously; XYZ had nothing to do with the problem. The state investigator would not say that he was mis-quoted, because the parenthetical material is not part of the quote, and the paper refused to correct the story for the same reason. But to any reader who does not know this obscure exception to the rule that what's in quotes is what they said, it meant I was the smartest guy in the room when and where things went bad.
I don’t think that “Heather spoke to [Sam] to the conference” vs “Heather spoke to her [Sam] at the conference” provides all that much meaningful clarity.
It comes down to what brackets mean, and the reader understanding what is quoted.
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.
Whenever I see “go home and bite [his] pillow”, I’ve always assumed the person spoke quickly and/or skipped a word, which the editor thought should be added. It never occurred to me before now that the editor actually replaced a word!
Right? Prior to this discussion, my thought was similar, typo, or something benign.
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...
Yeah, there is a cost to being precise. We can think of other ways to make it shorter, but we should respect the integrity of what is in quotes. Another option:
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.
I'd say we only do something like that in programming if there's a benefit to using other values for `it` in other contexts, and if we'd like to refer to a template `"It is not worth doing" by name.
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're just going to use it once, or if all usages have `[it=foobar]`, I don't think you'd do it.
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.
It wasn't referring to the specific identifier "it" here, but more in general as I took your point to mainly be about "if there's a benefit to using other values for X in other contexts", meaning that putting things into variables only serves the functionality of reuse in different contexts, not also to name passages of code.
> Otherwise we are on the slippery slope to, "oh, what they really meant to say is [phrase phrase phrase]".
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).
> 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.
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.
Although it happens often in natural communication, I find there is more chance for confusion, especially by a non-native reader, when a pronoun (or any proform) appears before its antecedent.
So resolving the pronoun with square brackets can be less confusing, to say nothing of the benefits of brevity.
> I find there is more chance for confusion, especially by a non-native reader, when a pronoun (or any proform) appears before its antecedent.
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.
You're talking about ordering among adjectives, which is unrelated to pronouns.
> 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."
The Chicago Manual of Style is fine with that. "Insertions may be made in quoted material to clarify an ambiguity, to provide a missing word or letters, or to give the original foreign word or phrase where an English translation does not convey the exact sense." This is indicated with brackets.
That is exactly how I use them. When quoting critically, doing that makes a lot of sense. It can get confusing and be quite verbose without that particular device.
But why remove the „it“? That changes the quote in a way that’s not marked, since the brackets denote an addition but not a removal. Keeping it would make it clearer what actually happened to the quote, That you merely expand what the „it“ references to, and thus is more trustworthy.
This is the only way I've ever seen them used - in your example, "[the subject]" would be replacing a word like "it" or "something." I seem to recall my English teacher saying it was used (paraphrasing) to change the text of a quote without changing its meaning, and that any other usage was incorrect.
Yes. The intent has to be honest rather than throwing out a device without nuance. It often seems like black&white reasoning to predicate an article on "why you should start doing this" or "why you should stop doing that."
As an additional device, [sic] is also helpful to indicate an original typo or improper usage not by the quoter.
Is it a regexp? I'm thinking if we could come up with a especially dense writing style that needs quadratic time to fully understand a sentence. Like you read a sentence of N words and get only a surface level meaning. Then you re-read it and understand a bit more. Repeat it about N times and you get the full picture.
It annoys me when someone gets interviewed, and they make intentionally vague comments to avoid leaking non-public information, and the interviewer fills in the blanks with whatever they think will generate the most clicks, wildly misrepresenting the statement, and giving it a completely different meaning than the interviewee intended.
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.
No, I think you're absolutely right, and the author of the Slate piece is a nitwit.
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.
The author's point here is different than that, though. The original writer had no need to substitute the pronoun in the short quote. It was replaced with just another pronoun, so no extra information was inserted. It would have been just as clear if left in its original phrasing.
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.
They're both right. The Slate article is just picking on an uncommon, mistaken use of the pattern. I agree that it's pointless whining — I don't know that I've ever seen this mistake made.
Normally one should paraphrase. Quotes are reserved for special cases where that exact way something is said is essential for communicating the message. And the need to add []-blocks is evidence that it doesn't belong to that special class.
Edit: All you lazy copy-paste writers downvoting all the comments here that propose paraphrasing instead of quoting: I see you.
Several reasons. Etiquette. Less reason mangle the words of others (arbitrarily cutting something out of larger context can also easily mangle). Let's your reader see how you understood the communication, not just that you found it somewhere and copy-pasted it in.
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?
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.
It’s a convenience to the reader. If I paraphrase a reference to support my point, it’s more work for you to determine if I’ve done so correctly. If I quote and update a dangling reference, it’s much easier for the reader to decide if I’ve done so in good faith and without introducing significant bias (whether intentionally or inadvertently).
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.
You seem to be misunderstanding. Square brackets are not paraphrasing, they are correcting words for context. They should not alter the meaning, as paraphrasing often does.
Hard disagree, the shift in perspective from third-person to the first-person quote is jarring. You use the brackets to mold the quote into the grammatical context of the sentence that surrounds. Extra emphasis on the context of the grammar, as changing the overall context alters its message.
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!
I'm sorry, but you are simply wrong. Quotes are, well, quotes, and if their grammar absolutely needs to be edited to fit your prose, then that means you shouldn't be using that quote.
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.
IMO using ellipsis [...] or modifying quotes in order to present them in a new context is totally okay, as long as you don't alter the original intended meaning fundamentally by doing so.
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.
> as long as you don't alter the original intended meaning fundamentally by doing so
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).
Simply wrong according to who? You? The MLA[0]? Some other "authoritative" source?
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..."
I should have mentioned I was coming from a reporting context. The AP style guide we were held to found it to be permissible.
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.
> 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.
This might be a language dependent thing. In my native language, Finnish, I don't think I've ever seen a quoted passage, quote marks intact, edited to grammatically fit in a sentence. A quote is a verbatim reproduction, a holy thing. Rather, you would work your sentence to accommodate for the quote. If you cannot do that, you'll leave out the quotes, and they are your words instead of a quote.
Just because a quote doesn't fit your favourite sentence may not mean that you “shouldn't be using that quote”.
>If what you suggest was truly necessary, wouldn't most complex dialogue in fiction be incomprehensible?
...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"?
The cost of that bracket abuse is people, having a reasonable command of the language, wondering whether the person quoted actually spoke in a broken English fashion.
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?
Doesn't english already have a perfectly good way to support "molding the quote into the grammatical context"?
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.
Often molding the quote to the 'grammatical context' simply means you've added too much anyway. For example, saying 'he says he's going to <quote>' which requires modification of the quote, vs. dropping it entirely: 'he says <quote>'.
I'm with you bigtime. I suspect some people on the other side of this question are not gramatically sensitive, or they are super literalist about the purpose of quotation.
>Look at it done correctly: tomc1985 objects that "[he is] one of these people, and [he] most definitely exists!"
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.
> You also need brackets around "exists" since the original quote had "exist".
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.
Done correctly is keeping the quote very close to the original and changing your text to make that work, instead of the other way around. Much better is:
tomc1985 objects: "I am one of these people, and I most definitely exist!"
> Hey now, I am one of those 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.
I know why Brackets are used in quotes - usually to add a subject that wasn't in the original quote but was obvious from the context, which is missing in the quote.
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 would've assumed Corky said "go home and bite pillow."
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 agree with you, if its used as a correction or clarification, I can totally understand that. Especially when people are quoted from what they verbally said, where it sometimes require context. But would the quoted person like that? Maybe you are pulling things out of context and now it looks he/she meant something else...
> I have been told that this bracketing fetish may come from academia, where formal rules of writing are a kind of hazing and where sounding faintly like a space alien could be mistaken for rigor. The academics are also wrong to do it. Presumably they believe it’s OK to vivisect quotations because the reader can always go to their footnotes and look up the original text to see what it actually says.
I disagree. The brackets are especially helpful if you quote partially and leave out parts of a paragraph and denote it with: [...]
I'm a former lawyer, and brackets are critical in legal writing. If you are quoting a court case or a brief, you need to be crystal clear about which precise words existed in the source and which ones you added in to make verbs/nouns match up.
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.
I agree with the author. Inserting brackets derails the flow. People know what a verbatim quote is. You don’t have to “translate” the pronoun. I’ve seen an uptick in this trend and it’s as welcome as pedantic ‘sics’ inserted into other people’s quotes.
And yet you presume that others here care enough about your opinion to post it for us. Presumtuous? No, you're entitled to your opinion and so is the author, and it's for the opinions of others that we all come to forums like this.
I've always hated those brackets. I never know why they've bracketed the word and what it's supposed to mean. At least now I know it's purpose, but it's still confusing. I absolutely agree with the author's points.
Well now you know: It is to provide clarification, particularly with pronouns that have less context when one part of a quote is lifted into another conversation/article.
While I was reading this rant about erroneous brackets, I was consistently thrown off by the authors wrong styling of links.
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.
This is bad advice citing comically-bad examples of the practice to criticize the practice. Yes, the specific examples given there are all bad and unnecessary, don't do that.
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.
By quoting with brackets (vs outright paraphrasing), you are staking some trust though. If I do search and find you’ve fabricated the quote, you’ve lost much more credibility than if I find you’ve paraphrased poorly. The latter can be argued to be innocent in a way the former cannot.
Pretty ironic to ascribe purely speculative emotions ("afraid") in the same breath as lambasting others for imprecision in ascribing words.
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
Your example is not what the article is talking about, because it doesn’t change words in the middle of the quote. An example would be:
> “[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.
This reminds me of how much I hate people saying "quote unquote" followed by what they're quoting. If you really insist on unquoting, please do it where it belongs. However, if you trust me in determining where your quote ends, please spare me the noise.
I saw one the other day on a news article where they'd put something like "They took him to hospital [sic]." The journalist hadn't realised that "to hospital" is correct English.
Well now I'm learning something here. I see that it's not standard English in the USA. I'm in a commonwealth country where that's the standard way to say it[1], and both the source of the quote and the article were local. But now I wonder if the journalist writing it might have been originally from the USA.
To elaborate, it appears that American English treats "hospital" as a place. So you go to the hospital, just like you go to the airport, or the subway station.
On the other hand, Commonwealth English treats "hospital" as something more like a state. You go to hospital just like you go to work.
This is a really good way of defining the difference. Although for whatever reason, you are at work, but you are in hospital.
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".
I'm probably wrong, but if I as to describe the rule in American English it would be "to the [place]" and "to [activity]". "Work" is an activity, just like practice, rehearsal, school, class, etc. but "hospital" is not.
That's a good way to think about it. I couldn't think of a rule for when I drop the article. I guess for the state in the US we would say "hospitalized". So I would say "he was hospitalized", unless the identity of "they" in the original quote was important.
If you refer to the place by its name, then I think you can drop the article. e.g. "I went to Burger King"; saying "I went to the Burger King" would be fine on its own but a bit odd if you're not going to add further clarifying information suggested by your use of "the", such as "... on main street (as opposed to the one on 5th)". Similarly, "I went to Overlake Medical Center (the nearest hospital)".
"Burgle" is not a particularly common verb (746k results for "burgle" with quotes on Google) compared to "burglar" (40m), so it's not on the tip of the tongue.
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.
The problem is that "sic" has two uses. The standard use is, as you say, to indicate that the text is as it appeared originally, and you didn't add a typo. The common Internet use is to indicate "This is wrong. Har har you're stupid." Many people don't realize the first usage exists.
> 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.
> 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.
It's basically a difference in emphasis between "Note that I didn't add this mistake." and "Note that I didn't add this mistake." so I'm not sure it's really a 'problem' you could point to with the grammatical device.
Somehow this makes me think of a story about the Bush-era euphemism for torture: "extended interrogation techniques."
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!)
I think the sin is removing words from the quotation. Adding editorial clarifications is sometimes unnecessary and often annoying, but can be read around. However substituting or outright omitting words without noting the removal is indeed "wrong" and "rude".
Agreed. Imho, the only valid use of brackets in a quote is where the original quoter left out some words due to a colloquial dialect, or just spoke badly, and the editor/author had to add a word or two so that the reader has a more clear understanding of what was said:
"house on fire!", Billy-Jo Bob shouted.
vs.
"[My] house [is] on fire!", Billy-Jo Bob shouted.
The use of the quotes makes it clear to the reader, that Billy-Jo didn't actually say the words 'my' and 'is', but they were added for clarification.
Any other usage (inside quoted text) is simply wrong.
I agree with you. Editing a direct quote should be a last resort, with a light touch, and only to provide clarity. Editing quotes for grammatical correctness is going too far, especially if the meaning is self evident to most readers. For the given example, it probably doesn't require editing. If rather Billy-Jo Bob was shouting to his neighbor Joanne about her house being on fire, then yes, adding that context is helpful, and wouldn't be apparent from the quote itself.
I agree entirely with Scocca; in the example he gives the editing of the quote is unnecessary and silly. But my pet peeve is the incorrect use of parentheses (()) rather than square brackets when editing quotes. People who do this are misquoting.
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.
But this only punts the question forward: why do they still use this reduced character set, when most (if not all) of their data is transmitted over the internet?
I have no idea whether they still use this reduced character set. But whether or not they do, this could still affect the protocol or stylebook, for the usual sorts of reasons when legacy systems are involved:
* 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.
I am curious too. After some research I assume the relevant standard is IPTC 7901, but I don't see a mention of excluded characters in the body of the newswire:
I can't give a concrete reason, but I suspect they might want to be able to transmit over channels with comparatively little bandwidth/much noise. Shannon taught us that more reliable communication in the face of low bandwidth and/or high noise is only possible with a smaller symbol set.
I could see that in some extraordinarily niche scenarios but if someone has the bandwidth to be transmitting full news articles then they have the bandwidth to use a whole 7 bits per character. And they should be compressing it too, at which point you don't need to restrict less common characters.
The set of people at the wire transmitting full articles might be different from the set publishing brief facts from low-bandwidth locations. (But it is convenient if they use the same infrastructure for it!)
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.
Compression removes redundancy. It's literally the definition of compression! And reduced redundancy is always bad when reliable transmission is a priority over small size.
Bit of a late reply, but resending it is a form of redundancy, and so is adding error correction bits. It is cheaper to do these things (they require less bandwidth) when you start with a limited character set.
The usage the author points out is odd, and one I would never use.
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!
The syntax given in the article is standard - a square-bracketed part replaces words in the original text that would otherwise appear there. Your proposed alternative is not standard.
(At least one example given in the article is incorrect usage, but the basic principle is normal and widely used.)
Is that the standard syntax? I've always been led to believe square brackets are used to insert words that don't exist in the quote.
> "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.
Yes, it is standard. Search the thread for MLA or manual. Academic papers are done this way and have been for a long time, and it's not hard to understand.
I've not seen a paper with it yet, and doing it introduces an ambiguity into an otherwise clean, parsable syntax. And frankly, doing that is completely unnecessary. Adds pretty much zero value, and is presumptuous.
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?
MLA is a standard, not the only standard. Just becase a significant portion of universities/academic instituitions have adopted it as their standard doesn't make it the worldwide standard at all. It doesn't even make it the standard for all academia.
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.
> A set of brackets is a barrier to understanding between the reader and the writer.
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.
Sorry, I forgot to spell out that side since it's _very_ deeply ingrained in me: that would just be bad English. (For the cases where it's possible; there are enough where it makes the quote nonsensical or overly long without bracketing something.)
The author's decision to link to a Fecal-Age Gawker article with zero substance in the introduction made it very difficult for me to take the rest of the article seriously. That he bases his arguments on something with so little actually being said damages his credibility.
While he does nothing to bolster his credibility, his argument nevertheless stands on its own merritt. If you'd like to respond to that argument, please do so.
His argument includes that article, which essentially boils down to "if you're correcting someone's grammar, you're wrong" without taking into account contextual difficulties that may have been caused by said poor grammar." Similarly, the author of TFA ignores most, if not all, arguments regarding contextual clarity.
That second part completely ruins the pithiness of the saying. It’s much better as just “I hate people who generalise.” Or, if you really feel the need to be explicit about the humour, “I hate people who generalise. All of them.”
Wow. The meta-ness of this humour almost defeated me, well played :D
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.
I agree wholeheartedly for the simple reason that the example in the article is destructive. It doesn’t only alter the quote, it reduces it. In my mind brackets, or sometimes parentheses, should only be used to add information to assist the reader. To remove a word and replace it with another within brackets is in my mind fundamentally and thoroughly wrong.
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.
What’s the proper way to quote someone who uses square brackets in what you are trying to quote? It seems as if this could get as thorny as the problem of escaping quote marks in quoted strings that besets programmers.
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.
The reason I always did it in school was because we’d have maximum word limits on essays (either due to an evil teacher or time constraints on exams) and copying an entire quote when you only needed the beginning and end would eat up time you could use to write the analysis bits. Maybe I’ll grow out of it (or maybe I already have, given I rarely shorten quotes when writing for fun on the internet).
I think worse than this defacement is when someone alters a quote to redact (usually using punctuation) or intentionally misspell "bad" words.
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.
The root behind most (meaningful) objections to bad grammar comes back to clarity - by using poor grammar, the writer obfuscates the meaning of a sentence. In this case, the meaning is perfectly clear, and it is pretty obvious what the original quote is. Writing a whole article nit-picking something like this is obnoxious and silly.
I completely agree and I'm glad I'm not the only one! The point about readers needing to guess what was changed, and why, and how honest the alteration is pin points how I feel when I read quotes which overuse or misuse brackets.
I assume your schooling is very recent, as this practice of changing text within quotations is new, and completely wrong. A quote is what was said, verbatim.
I'm confused. I'd assumed that brackets in quotes were to add words for the sake of clarity, not substitute them. So I would have assumed the original quote to have been "go home and bite pillow".
In such cases, is there a different style (perhaps different brackets?) to indicate an insertion rather than a substitution?
lol, so that's what that's all about. I honestly struggled for ages to understand what it was, it made quotes surprisingly difficult for me to understand. Can't believe I never worked this out, doh.
I'm hella suspicious, depending on the source, of quotes that have been mangled, shortened, or otherwise stripped of the context provided by the quotees own words.
It's classic narrative fabrication to paraphrase bs and use tiny mangled quotes to sell it.
The OP is speaking specifically about inside of quote marks though. And I agree with op. Don’t go change me to [him] etc when me is already part of a sentence inside of quotation marks.
I agree with the OP, but journalists have a different priority from other writers of prose. Information accuracy is of paramount importance, with deviance from the original being important to highlight. The other thing they do, is use an ellipsis (…) to indicate excised text.
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.
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.