Today’s paper. Australian cricket captain Ricky Ponting is talking about Sri Lanka preparing wickets that favour their spinners:
"It will spin from the first morning. It hasn’t got one blade of grass on it. When we turned up yesterday they were dusting it up again trying to get more grass off it.
"(But) we have spinners who will make life very difficult for their batsmen as well.
"You only have to look back at the wickets we produced against India this summer to work out Australia is probably the only place in the world where it (preparing wickets for the home side) doesn’t happen.
“I have heard about this place before, where the captain tells the curator what’s the best (wicket to prepare).”
Each of the comments in parentheses has been added by the journalist, presumably to clarify the quoted speech. Personally I find them intrusive and unnecessary; the (But) adds nothing to the meaning of the sentence and may in fact dilute it’s delivery, (preparing…) is only needed if I have already forgotten what he is talking about and similarly with the last comment.
Generally this is my reaction to these intrusions into quotes, they usually seem to be unnecessary.
My question though is this. I have read the paper most days for the last 30 odd years and I am adamant that these intrusions are a relatively recent innovation. My recollection is that many years ago people were quoted word for word and that was it. I raised the story above in a discussion today and everyone else insists that it has always been this way, even our publication people think so (they both think the comments are a good thing).
My feeling is that this started to creep into papers in the 80s and is becoming more prominent.
They’re standard and established practise in academic writing styles, always using square brackets. I agree that overuse in newspaper articles is annoying - normally it’s sloppy writing, because the examples you give are of the type where a re-write of the paragraph in question will make things far clearer.
I suspect the opposite. In the past, the papers possibly cleaned up the grammar, and didn’t bother telling the reader. There may have also been less interviewing (e.g. no TV) and more reliance on press handouts etc. Its only today that people are terrified of misquoting someone, so it important to state exactly what was said. (I) think it is useful though slighlty (sic) annoying to the eye.
Well, in the US, they use [brackets], not parens. However, the usage was mentioned in the Chicago Manual of Style in the mid-80s, so it probably dates from before that. Brackets are used to make grammatical quotes that are ungrammatical out of context, and to indicate the quoter has made a change for clarity’s sake. I’ve seen the construction [T]he as a way to indicate the original wasn’t captalized, but the structure of the quote required capitalization.
In the context you quoted, the brackets are fully justified:
“(But) we have spinners” indicates that [But] wasn’t part of the actual quote and was put there for style or clarity sake.
“it (preparing wickets for the home side) doesn’t happen” – In this case, the antecedent for “it” is unclear from the quote.
“best (wicket to prepare).” – Same thing. The quote is clarified. There’s also a possibility the speaker used a slang term that the audience wouldn’t recognize, but which the words in brackets define.
What scm1001 says hadn’t crossed my mind but presumably could well be true - who would complain about a journalist making them sound smarter?
And they are square brackets and not parentheses, which further convinces me they are more common since I started wearing glasses about 12 years ago, otherwise I would have known that.
GorillaMan are you recommending what scm1001 thinks used to happen? Just fix the quote and leave it at that.
RealityChuck are you speaking as a professional or simply expressing a point of view. As I said most people agree with the usage anyway. I would think the capitalisation example is fine because it rectifies an error in the original and some examples in quotes do clarify the speaker’s intent but mostly they interfere with my reading. God forbid that novelists start to write dialogue in this manner.
No. It should nearly always be possible for the writing around the quotation to clarify the context, so the exact words of the speaker can be used without alteration.
I agree with scm1001. In the past, it was much more common to clean up quotes leaving no trail. Indeed, it was much more common to make up quotes from whole cloth if the speaker either could not be heard clearly or didn’t say exactly what you wanted him to say.
It depends upon the publication. They’re both common in U.S. news publications. In fact, parentheses might be more common, because until the advent of modern computerized publishing, brackets often weren’t a part of the character set available to newspaper publishers.
While I agree that in this case there seem to be more bracketed explanation than I’m used to, it’s not always efficient to clarify the context around the quote. This is journalism, not literature, and the object usually is to impart the necessary information to the reader in the least words possible.
So far as I’ve noticed, this doesn’t seem at all to be a recent trend. You have to realize that journalistic writing is a very different beast from creative writing.
don’t ask SAID: ‘Personally I find them intrusive and unnecessary’
Okay, but you can just ignore them to read what the person being quoted actually said. That’s why they are seperated.
As far back as I can remember from reading news and tabloids is that it has always been common. My memory goes back on this subject to when I was 12 and started reading the tabloids (news papers).
That wasn’t the problem. Square brackets have been part of the Linotype typesetter since the 19th century. The problem was with the news wires. Brackets could not be transmitted over news wires. My 1977 edition of the Associated Press Stylebook advises, “Use parentheses or recast the material.”