Editing quotes to reflect proper speech

[Stitch]

Let me restate the underlying question that SF_Express and those who might agree with him don't seem willing to address: Why do we always need to quote? If Ozzie Guillen doesn't utter a single phrase or sentence that you can quote, then don't quote him! As a former visitor to the White Sox clubhouse, and to others with non-native speakers of English, I suspect that there are bits in there that can be quoted, without changing any words. But if tonight there is not a single bit that can be quoted accurately, then paraphrase him. Why is that not acceptable?

It seems to me that someone can allow the dropping of "um" and "uh," without endorsing the fabulism of changing one word to another. To me, changing the words to something that suits you better is way over the line. Why? Well, it's not accurate. It's not verifiable. We're in the getting-it-right business. We're not mind readers. We quote what people say, or it's not a quote.

As a reporter, and an editor, for newspapers from the smallest to the largest, in news and in sports, it's been my experience that quoting people accurately is one of the hallmarks of good reporting. If you put quotes around it, it had better be words that the person actually said. Perhaps not every word they said -- truncate, truncate!, and dropping the "ums" is OK, too -- but the quote must not include any words that person didn't say, just because the reporter thinks those words are "better." It would indeed be a firing offense in several departments I've worked in if a reporter confessed, Oh, I didn't like the word he said here, so I changed it to one I liked better, but left the quotation marks.

Is this really controversial? Isn't this something you would pride yourself on getting right?

Another matter is the sports department's common practice of injecting parenthetical words inside the quotes. To my ear, this is a rookie mistake, but not as bad as changing words. Some newspaper stylebooks (such as the one at The New York Times) caution against it. The better writers rarely do it, because they don't see it in good writing, and realize that stepping on a quote with a parenthetical robs the quote of its voice. Besides, it's unnecessary, because you can add the information before or after the quotation, or interrupt the quotation to add the phrase. But at least the reader can tell it has been done, because of the brackets or parentheses. I'm referring to cases where an EXTRA word is given for explanation. ("But that's been going on ever since my dad [Bobby] was playing baseball," Bonds said.) That's not the elegant way to handle it, but at least the reader still knows what has been said.

Farther down the falsehood spectrum is SUBSTITUTING words, because then the reader is left to guess what the person said, which defeats the purpose of quotation. ("I asked [umpire Joe Smith] why he made the call, and he said the ball beat me to the bag.") In that case, the reader isn't told whether the player said "Joe" or "Smith" or "the bum" or "that fat biscuit." Just trust the reader a little, and say what the person said, and give the minimum explanation that's needed. As others have pointed out, some of our fellow reporters and editors have gotten in the habit of changing words or throwing in parentheticals in nearly every quote, whether the quote is perfectly understandable or not, because they don't trust the reader.

But using parentheticals is a style question. Changing words in quotes, with no warning to the reader, is an ethical question.

I'd like to compare your published work to audio of interviews that you've done, because I can pretty much guarantee that you have not been 100 percent accurate in quoting someone according to your standards.

 

[inthesuburbs]

It's not about accuracy of notetaking. We all make mistakes there. No one is 100 percent. We do our best. And if we make an error, it's just making an error.

But once you get the word that the person said, or what you heard and wrote down, then when it comes time to write, you don't change it to a different word because you think the person should have said that word instead. That would be making stuff up.

See the difference?

 

[SF_Express]

But using parentheticals is a style question. Changing words in quotes, with no warning to the reader, is an ethical question.

Yes, it is. And we simply don't agree on the absolutes on this issue.

 

[BobSacamano]

What's the vibe from you guys regarding published Q&A interviews?

I see it's fairly unanimous that we remove the ums, uhs, and ain'ts. I elect to write out 'going to' and 'want to' rather than 'gonna' and 'wanna.' I'm not injecting my words to the quote, but I believe anything that's published should be legible and read smoothly -- especially if we're talking about a quote-heavy interview.

There has to be a little license in clarifying some sentences, right? We all have quirks, don't we?

 

[Babs]

There is someone at my shop that uses parentheses almost every one of their quotes, usually to explain what point a person was trying to make. 99 percent of the time, you know what the person was talking about with reading what's in the parentheses.

I've got someone who adds a bunch of explanation too. Highly annoying. As if they are the only one who can interpret the quote. We all understand who the pronouns refer to, idiot.

 

[Ace]

There is someone at my shop that uses parentheses almost every one of their quotes, usually to explain what point a person was trying to make. 99 percent of the time, you know what the person was talking about with reading what's in the parentheses.

I've got someone who adds a bunch of explanation too. Highly annoying. As if they are the only one who can interpret the quote. We all understand who the "he" refers to, idiot.

This is a particular pet peeve of mine.

"We (the Podunk Pelicans boys' basketball team) think we can beat them (the visiting Crosstown Rivals)," coach Paul Potts said. "Tomorrow's game (Saturday, Feb. 13) is going to be a barn burner (editor's note: Unkikely as Podunk hasn't been within 20 points of Crosstown in three years)."

 

[Babs]

What's the vibe from you guys regarding published Q&A interviews?

I see it's fairly unanimous that we remove the ums, uhs, and ain'ts. I elect to write out 'going to' and 'want to' rather than 'gonna' and 'wanna.' I'm not injecting my words to the quote, but I believe anything that's published should be legible and read smoothly -- especially if we're talking about a quote-heavy interview.

There has to be a little license in clarifying some sentences, right? We all have quirks, don't we?

Q&A's need the most editing usually, since you can't paraphrase. As you say, it's a readability issue.

I make it into full sentences except when they seem to jump out of a sentence because they almost said something they shouldn't have. That I leave in because it's sometimes the most interesting part.

If there's an answer where I can't make it make sense easily, I try to just include the info in the intro.

 

[OrthogonalWaterfowl]

I run into this problem a lot, but it's mostly with accents. I recently did an interview with a fellow who presumably spoke english as a second language, pretty fluently but not flawlessly. As a result, most of his quotes had grammatical or idiomatic idiosyncrasies that looked slightly odd in print. I deliberately chose to use quotes that downplayed these errors, because I felt it would be improper to drop extraneous words and misused phrases just because I didn't like how it read. I do think you should be conscious of making a source sound like an idiot when what they said sounded perfectly normal outloud, but let's be honest: few people talk in a manner that reads well as a direct transcription.

As an aside, it irks me when pause words like um and uh appear in anything less strict than courtroom transcription. Most of the time I see them used, I get the impression they're included solely to make the speaker sound dumb or hesitant. Unless they alter the content of the sentence or the way it would be understood, I see no reason to keep them in there. They're basically non-words... if a source sneezed midway through a sentence, would you quote that, as well?

Also, as for approximating a quote when you're not 100% certain you have an accurate transcription, I try to avoid this if at all possible. If I'm taking notes by hand and can't keep up, I'll always mark down the point where I become uncertain about the accuracy so I know how far into the sentence I can directly quote. For something as minor as "We've been at this since 1995" vs. "We have been at this ever since 1995," I think it's acceptable to take your best guess. But if it's anything more major than that, and especially if you're actively creating words or phrases, I think you should really be paraphrasing. It's a bummer when I'm uncertain about the middle of what would be a really great direct quote, but I just take that as motivation to transcribe better in the future!

 

[OrthogonalWaterfowl]

Also, and a pet peeve... it drives me crazy when you see one of those mutant quote-paraphrase hybrids in print. Things like:

According to coach Harold Bilburn, it's essential to the well-being of the team that they "reach the semi-finals and win the division. It would really raise the morale of our players."

That's not a great example, admittedly, but hopefully it illustrates what I'm referring to. Things like that always jump right out at me, like, "Oh, here's the writer trying to awkwardly salvage a bad quote that they really want to use." I think plucking a word or phrase out of a quote is fine, but transitioning into or out of a quote mid-sentence while the speaker is still talking just strikes me as sloppy.

 

[beardpuller]

My two cents: I've gone back and forth on this issue over the years. When I was very young, I was a militant about never changing anything, I felt people had the right to their own idiom, that it was condescending of me to impose my "correctness"on them, blah, blah, blah ... except I came to realize that many of the readers weren't operating from that perspective and were snickering at "ignorant" athletes, especially those of a different race/culture.
My thinking these days is, I don't clean up the quote unless it would seem that I'm somehow trying to make the speaker look like a deck by quoting him speaking ungrammatically.
One problem I have is that the team I cover regularly holds lots of news conferences and transcripts everything. The transcripts save a lot of time ... but the team cleans up to a fault, including eliminating contractions, making the quotes sound really stilted and artificial sometimes. So if it's a pithy quote, I find it on my tape and use my version instead of the "official" one.