Please stop putting your words inside someone else's quotation marks

Great. Now I'm confused about quotes and depressed too.

 

BWIP asks: "If quotes are indeed so sacred, how do you reconcile that with your earlier post about being fine taking out things like "um, uh" and stuff like that?"

BWIP seems to be making a slippery slope argument. He's suggesting that if I support the taking out an "um," then how can I possibly hold the ethical line against making up words of my own and including them inside the quote marks. I suspect most of us can see the difference.

All quotation is, by definition, selective. Out of all the words that a person said, we pick a section to include. I wouldn't remove a substantive word, wouldn't change the meaning or mislead the reader about what was said, but an "um," sure. It serves the reader, and it serves the person quoted.

But if I start assuming that "ones" means "innings" when it could mean "games," then I'm in the making-stuff-up business. That's not a service to the reader, nor a service to the person quoted.

And it's halting, distracting, as others have pointed out. It's a show stopper. If you are using a quote the way a quote can be poweful, to carry the voice, it can be the best part of a story. If, right there in the middle of it, you have parentheses with your words instead of the speaker's, it has lost its power.

Is it the worst thing we do? No. Does good writing relate to the business going into the crapper? Let's hope so. Let's hope that good reporting and good writing has something to do with a bright future.

 

I guess we can agree to disagree, then.

I believe if you're going to take the hard-line stance that "quotes are sacred", then you need to put every last "you know" and "um, uh," etc., in there. Otherwise, you're cherry-picking which things you can fix in a quote and which things must be left alone. If it's OK to take those things out, then it's OK to insert a parenthetical to make it clear what the person is talking about.

I also don't know why are we assuming that it isn't damn clear that the person in the original quote was talking about innings and not games? What if the question was about the inning and just the inning, and the quote was "That was one of the craziest ones I've ever been a part of." Inserting (innings) in place of "ones" isn't in the making-stuff-up business. It's making clear to the reader what the subject was talking about. Is there a better way to do that? Probably, I'll grant you that. But I'd argue it's a little bit of overdramatization to say any quote loses its power if there's a parentheses thae makes clear to the reader what the subject is saying.

During my time in the business, and my opinion may be void since I'm no longer in it, I never heard a complaint/concern/question from a reader or interview subject about this practice. I'd say it falls pretty far down the list on things we need to worry about (like moonlight posted).

 

Burbs.. pretend you're a reporter who covered the Indians' one-game playoff win against the Yankees.
You ask Ricky Vaughn what was going through his mind with the last out.
He replies "Dorn came over and told me to strike this motherfucker out, so I did"
Do you run that quote verbatim in the paper or do you run it as "Dorn came over and told me 'Strike this (guy) out', so I did." ?

 

This is the insight Im going to miss.

 

could you be more clear, please?

 

Do you have any reason to believe the author made a mistake, that it was supposed to be games instead of innings?

 

In this case, instead of changing the quote to say that it was "one of the craziest (innings) I've ever seen" you could set up the quote by saying the player had never seen an inning like it.

"It was one of the craziest ones I've ever seen," he said.

I am not a fan of changing words an putting them in there. Two reasons:

1. If it's so obvious to you, why change it? The readers should be smart enough to figure it out.

2. If the player said "ones" and you assume he met innings, how do you know? Maybe it's on a quote sheet and he was asked whether this was one of the wackiest games he had been in and he responded that way.

How do you know he meant innings?

 

Obviously it would be nice if someone who was there for the quote could post, but I think the reporter deserves the benefit of the doubt in this case. It sounds like a pretty crazy inning, and I would imagine there were several direct questions about it and it's very likely one answer was that the inning was one of the craziest ever.

 

I am not saying it's wrong. I am just using it as an example.

 

Bravo, Ace!
Why do so many writers/editors think their readers are idiots, can't understand context?

 

This strikes me as coming from the same school of thought that thinks emphasizing spelling in elementary school stifles a student's creativity.
We fix the problems we can, and the annoying reliance on parentheses that has been building in this business for my entire 30 years is certainly one we can address.