I remember learning at some point in my educational career about interviews and quoting people in writing. Somewhere in that literary lesson was an explanation of how to quote someone but include a word or two that maybe they didn't exactly say. If my memory serves me correctly, doing this involved putting the unspoken words in brackets so that the sentence would make sense but the reader would know that those particular words didn't come from the person being quoted. For instance, if Guy were asked to describe me as a person, he might say, "Caity is a nice girl." Then, when I was writing an article about myself in the local paper, I would write, Guy Tarbert says of his wife, "Caity [is the most beautiful and creative] girl [I know]. Obviously that's a stretch, but hopefully you know what I'm talking about by now.
See, the thing is, whenever I see those little substitutionary brackets in real news articles, I wonder what the original person actually did say. For instance, this quote is taken from an the AP's coverage of Larry David and his wife's recent breakup.
"The split was "very amicable and ... they're going to continue to raise their two (daughters) together as friends," spokeswoman Heather Lylis said Tuesday."
What did Heather really say in place of "daughters"? "They're going to continue to raise their two clumsy Jewish fembots together as friends"? Their alien hermaphrodite children? What? It's almost like a pop culture game of Mad Libs. And you know I love Mad Libs.
1 comment:
Not to spoil your fun, but depending on certain rules (which I could look up, but that would take too much time on my slow computer), I think one of the ONLY times they are able to add anything is to add the name/reference of a person/persons talked about by the quoted person. So in your example, it should have directly read "they're going to raise their two together as friends..." and daugthers was interjected to name the reference. Should is the operative word here.
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