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Dear Jessica, let me introduce a tool that you can add your journalistic toolkit: square brackets. As user Kosmonaut says in an "English Language and Usage" post: "[Square brackets] are used to indicate that a direct quote has been edited — to fit the surrounding information, or to add context that does not show up within the scope of the quote."

See, originally, the word "these" appeared where "[Square brackets]" appears in the above quote. However, since you don't have context for the quote, you wouldn't have known that "these" referred to "square brackets". So, I put "Square brackets" in square brackets to add clarity to the quote.

I hope I have shown you how useful square brackets are and I suspect that since you seem to be involved in journalism, which often involves quotes, you will find opportunities to use them!

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2271/what-is-the-...




to properly use [] on a recorded interview is overkill. just glance on the transcript... there is barely a proper english phrase there. the whole thing would be 80% brackets just to make it grammatically correct.




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