Another discussion on how to quote athletes

My simple rule: would someone outside of journalism listening to a recording of the quote notice the difference?

 

Roberto Clemente, for one, would like you to clean up his quotes.

 

My favorite baseball player of all time.

 

I am going to say this one more time. It is hypocritical to say that a reporter's copy can be edited for spelling and grammar and then say that quotes are "sacred" and can't be touched. It's contradictory on the face of it. Mark is right. There is a difference between spoken and written English.

 

No...fixing grammatical error goes far beyond eliminating 'ohs, ahs, uhs, you knows and likes'......they are completely different things.....and I agree with whoever said that before tape recorders, this wasn't even a discussion.

 

Unless the entire story is surrounded by special marks saying "this is exactly what was written word for word," then that argument makes no sense.

I agree with the part about there being a difference between written and spoken English. That makes much more sense.

 

Yep. And an absolute disgrace the way his quotes were written up by contemporary reporters. My standard is: treat a source the way you'd wish to be treated; don't embarrass them by making them sound stupid when they're not. If quotes are that sacred, make a podcast and let people listen to the interview so they can judge for themselves. In writing, a little cleaning up never hurt anybody. The purpose of using the quote is to get the message across -- even if it's a message they didn't intend to send -- so the grammar and "uhh's" aren't nearly as important as ... capturing the spirit of the thing.

 

Roberto Clemente had that same problem.

 

Very well.

 

No. I'm saying the writer should have cleaned it up. I'm not giving you advice on how to be a PR guy. That's my wife's deal.

 

Unless it is somebody who is running for president, governor, or a state legislator or city council member, some of the language should usually be cleaned up so the reader can understand it.

I remember one horse racing writer who would use phonetic sounds to say what Spanish-speaking jockey. The problem there is that he didn't do it for a jockey who would speak with a Noo Yawk Italian accent or a jockey of another ethnic group.

The other thing is that in an interview, somebody might leave out articles or other parts of speech because they are just trying to say what happened quickly without pausing to put it in a form which would look good in the newspaper. If they waited to do that, they would probably censor themselves and be less honest.

 

So would Jimmy Snuka and The Ultimate Warrior