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Brackets
The Bracket Blues
By Evan Jenkins
Except when excerpting text or in such devices as blurbs and pull-quotes, bracketing material inside quotations is, not to put too fine a point on it, an abomination.
1. Genuinely good quotes are mangled by bracketing: “Our prisons are full of [those who were] abused children,” he said. Clunk. The story had already set up the quote adequately, but if it hadn’t, a phrase before the quote, not that awful hiccup inside it, was the solution. (Explanations can also come after quotes, of course; the point here is that hitting the reader over the head with a hammer is unkind.)
2. Bracketing can puzzle readers and even make them suspicious (what did that guy really say?): “I read about teams getting competitive [by signing] other players,” he said. Anyone’s guess.
3. Bracketing assaults the ear, making for agonizing reading: “No one among the big three [networks] would run this long at the top [the beginning of the show] with these kinds of stories” now, Rather said. In a word, aargh. If a quote needs that much help (this one didn’t) why bother to quote at all?
4. Some bracketing results in ridiculous things inside quotation marks: “They started calling me Duke because I wear No. 4 [Duke Snider’s old number],” said Piercy. Just end the quoted matter at “4” and tell the rest.
Most importantly, bracketing is lazy — a kind of stenography. In that regard it’s a soulmate of that other hallmark of bad journalistic writing, the stringing-together of words before a name (CJR, January/ February 2000; “False Titles, etc.” on the Web). Both are abdications of our duty to write English sentences. On deadline? No time to write? Try. It could become a habit. (CJR July/August 2002)
Addendum, 8/26/02:
Absolutely not the way to handle the problem:
"If I’d had a walkie-talkie, I’d have told jockey Victor Espinoza to pull him up."
Real people do not say in conversation, and trainers do not respond to shouted questions after a big-time horse race, “I’d have told jockey Victor Espinoza” — using the first name along with the job description. It just doesn’t happen, and it didn’t. A Nexis search showed slight variations in different accounts of the post-race analysis. Some of the many versions had just “Victor,” others just “him.” Others put brackets around “jockey” or “Espinoza” or, heaven help us, both. But “jockey Victor Espinoza” seems to have been a singular contortion.
Presumably an editor was loath to use brackets to provide the name or names missing from the real quotation. It’s good to be loath that way. But it was possible to work around the problem, as it almost always is. Mentioning the jockey before using the quote, then quoting accurately — as some reports did — is a wonderfully natural solution. And even brackets are better than phrasing so tortured its falsity jumps off the page.
CJR
