Editing quotes to reflect proper speech

speaking of making things up when you feel like it, that's a bit of a stretch from what sf said.

 

I've never been of the mindset that it was my job to keep my sources from looking like idiots by cleaning up their quotes. If they can't look good on their own, I don't view it as my place to do it for them in the newspaper. If I have to do that to make the quote understandable, then I paraphrase. I read an article in CJR or somewhere one time, and they quoted a highly placed editor saying shd didn't want to make the single mom who dropped out of high school look like a Wellesley graduate. Every time I have to consider this, that's the thing that pops into my mind.

 

novelist wannabe: That's a good point about the single mom high school dropout thing. Never thought of it that way.

Maybe somebody can help me out here. There's a movie that I'm dying to think of where a reporter is interviewing an athlete (I think it's a baseball player) after a game and the athlete says a whole bunch of stupid shit that makes no sense and then says to the reporter, "Clean that up for me, will ya?"

It's hilarious but I can't think of what movie it is for the life of me.

 

Hell, that's not a movie. That's real life.

 

Couple of things that came to mind for me....

I used to be an athlete and have been interviewed before. One time it was by our school SID. When I saw him just scribbling out his notes on a sheet of paper--this was when I was also a journalism student--he said, "Oh don't worry, everyone loves how I make them sound smart in the paper." Went on to tell me all about how he was loved for that back in his newspaper days.

I'm all for a little cleanup every now and then, but at that moment the thought crossed my mind, Maybe that's why you're an SID at a DII school. (Mean, I know.) But it just seems unprofessional to me, for some reason.

HOWEVER, W.C. Heinz comes to mind. He was renowned for the dialogue in his stories, right? And I'm pretty sure he didn't always use a tape recorder and transcriber.

I dunno. Just my two cents or whatever.

 

With all respect, this is the kind of thing that has always driven me nuts about the news business and, of course, why I like it: The notion that it's 100 percent one way or another, with no gray area or wiggle room in between.

Obviously, nobody's talking about making things up.

You get a quote. As Frank noted, before recording devices, we all wrote them down anyway, and nobody wrote them down 100 percent accurately. You just did the best you can, and 99 percent of the time, you were fine.

When the quote appears in the newspaper, if it's an accurate reflection, within a few words, of exactly what the speaker was trying to convey, you're fine. It has been this way since Gutenberg.

To put it another way, if the speaker has no problem with what his written quote reflects (not accounting, of course, for complete backtracking on something he actually said), then you're good.

None of this applies to "making things up." It all applies to common sense ways of doing business that we have been doing for hundreds of years.

 

I think we all pretty much agree that generally speaking it's OK to tidy up a quote here or there to make it understandable, as long as you don't dramatically change the tone of the quote. ("I ain't gonna BS you" to "I would not fabricate the truth.")

The only real problem, IMO, is if you are making the normal fixes for most of your quotes, but intentionally hanging some people out to dry with verbatim quotes. Can make you appear biased.

 

Something I've often wondered about. What's considered "cleaning up" and what's considered just writing what the person said?

I've seen a lot of writing in features that makes use of dialect. Dropping gs (comin', goin', etcin'.) using words like "gonna." That sort of thing. There's really no confusion about what these people are saying and, to me, the fact that they have a regional accent doesn't mean they're saying it incorrectly or using improper grammar. If you were interviewing a Brit, would you write schedule "sheddual?" I don't think so.

I'm not talking about the football player who speaks entirely in slang or has atrocious grammar, but whenever I read a lot of dialect spelling, particularly when the person quoted is using the words in a grammatically-correct manner, it always reads wrong to me.

 

I tidy them up all the time. Especially when what the coach actually said would sound odd or make them look dumb.

Like S_F, I have never met someone who didn't do it.

 

Perhaps apropos of very little, I once a coach ream me out for printing "hell of a" instead of "helluva". Said he got a call from a minister. Is that considered cleaning up? If it is, then I guess I sound like a hypocrite.

 

You can't be serious -- we'd all pretty much agree that if a person says one thing, it's OK to have that person say another thing, and to put it in quotation marks?

No. Quotes are sacred.

I agree completely with those who say that none of us takes notes 100 percent accurately. But that's not the issue. We try like hell to get it right.

And having gotten it as close to the person said it as possible, we don't then say, well, it would sound better if I changed this word, or substituted that word. You may not want to call that "making stuff up," but that's what it is.

Why not make the guy taller while you're at it?

Getting a quote wrong -- that's a hazard of taking notes. But changing the words in the quote, on purpose? A firing offense in any good shop.

I'm back to the question that went unanswered: If the quote that you get isn't good enough to be quoted (not understandable, not pithy, not clean enough for a newspaper, whatever), why not paraphrase it? What would be wrong with that?

 

You misunderstood me. My example in parens was a change that would not be acceptable. I assumed that was clear.

It relays the same info but is an entirely different quote.

An acceptable change would be "he don't play" to "he doesn't play." My point is if you are going to make that fix with some quotes, you should do it with all. Otherwise it does just look like you are trying make certain subjects look bad.