Quotes are sacred

I think most papers have a policy for this, and most probably go the (expletive) route. I see your point on that, but I think there's a difference between letting the reader make the inference and spelling it out. I just don't think most papers are ready to use the profanity in print, and I can see the reasoning for that. My paper will use it if it's critical to a story, but this probably wouldn't qualify.

 

Right. So just don't use the quote. Write around it.

Rice once said he didn't want writers loving him, or even his teammates. He merely wanted them to respect him.


There. You use the info you think is important, and you don't bastardize someone else's words.

 

Agreed. A good writer/editor can write around most of these problems.

 

I just re-read that and realized it was horribly written. I'm not one of those "good writers" you're talking about. But I'll leave it so people can laugh at me.

 

Your point still stands. And we'll laugh WITH you, not at you.

 

In that example, why do you need the quote? Just paraphrase.

Quotes should add something to the story. "hit him hard" is mundane.

 

Yeah, we get that.
It was just something to be used as an example.

 

I agree that, whenever possible, you should write around parentheses. Sometimes, it can be fairly simple.

Where I break with the original poster is in his belief that there is NEVER a situation in which use of parentheses is acceptable. I had an example last night in a basketball game I covered. It was a quote I really thought I needed, but the coach kept talking about "our guys" (meaning his team, obviously) and "they" (meaning the opposing team). I needed to use parentheses to clarify who he was talking about in each sentence.

If I had written as is, something like (and I'm making this up as an example): "Our guys just didn't come to play. They were great from the very beginning." -- that doesn't make any sense.

If you use parentheses, it makes life easier on the reader, which is part of our job.

"Our guys just didn't come to play. (The Tigers) were great from the beginning."

I might catch some flak from this, but I don't buy this belief that "quotes are sacred." Like I said earlier, we aren't in the stenography business. Yes, you want to quote people as accurately as possible, but it's not the be all, end all.

What did our predecessors, before digital tape recorders do? They wrote down quotes. You're telling me Jim Murray quoted everyone he interviewed word-for-word? Hell, even with the digital recorders of today, I can guarantee the quote sheets teams pass out as "official" aren't even word-for-word.

It's important to make sure you get the person's meaning correct ... beyond that, I'm not a stickler. I will occasionally drop a superfulous word or sentence, if the quote is a run-on and it's bogging down the flow of a story. I will use parentheses if it's absolutely neccesary.

Call me a heretic if you want. I don't give a hell.

 

quotes are sacred. a quote is a verbatim record of what was actually said. anything else is a paraphrase, summary or the listener's recitation of what another person uttered.
If you somehow feel the need to act as editor and journalist and morality police officer and clean up the quote to make the speaker sound more polished or smarter, less stupid or ignorant then respect the reader enough to avoid the quotation marks.
It's sad to listen to a post game interview of a player who can't utter 4 consecutive words of actual English, yet you read his quote in the morning paper he sounds like a goddamn High School English teacher.

No one is demanding that journalists be stenographers, but if you quote someone, quote them completely and accurately or just provide an unquoted summary.

 

SG:

"Our guys just didn't come to play," Coach Blow said.
The Tigers took over from the start with a 15-0 run to start the game.



Facts will always get the point across better than a coach saying "They played well from the beginning." Tell me HOW they played well. Use the coach's first quote, then get out.

And we'll differ on the importance of properly quoting. Contrary to my last few posts, I'm not anti-parentheses. I've used them. I just think if you CAN write around them you should. However, I think you HAVE to quote people with what they said. You do the best you can. Without digital recorders, obviously, you missed some stuff. But that would be like saying "They didn't used to have spellcheck, so I don't worry if my words aren't spelled right." You have to use the technology you have available to do your job the best way you can. And when media are being judged the way they are, you can't give people any more reason to say they weren't quoted properly.

 

I think according to the New York Times style guide, on second reference a man is referred to as "Mr. Smith."

I have a problem with that because that means the NYT style calls for Mr. Bin Laden and Mr. Hitler. "Mr." is a courtesy title and some people don't deserve the courtesy.

They're guidelines, not rules.

Carry on.

 

At the risk of getting severely flamed here, may I ask what I've always thought to be a perfectly logical question?
If a reporter on our newspaper staff (or ourselves) writes a sentence that needs work grammatically, we have (or at least used to have) professional copy editors for that task. A reporter who hurriedly types "there" for "they're," for example, hopes to be backstopped by his desk so as to not to look stupid in print. We make mistakes. Typos. Bad sentences. God knows my desk has caught a million of my errors over the years.
So don't the high school athletes or race car drivers or NBA players who don't have as much education as I do deserve a little bit of that courtesy? At the VERY least, shouldn't we clean up their grammar to the point of leaving out "uhs?" I mean, come on. I absolutely don't think we should change the meaning of a quote or anything even close to that. But do we really have to leave off a "g" when a guy says a word like lovin' or foolin' or askin'? Do we really have to point that thing out to show how smart we are?