Tracking a Quotation

Tracking a Quotation Tracking a Quotation Tracking a Quotation By Maeve Maddox When a reader asked about the use of brackets in a recent email, I started to refer him to my post When and How to Use Brackets and leave it at that. Curiosity overcame me, however, and I tried to track down the complete original. Heres the quotation that prompted the readers question: [Well] probably never quite know who was the greatest of all time in tennis, Federer told reporters. ABC News (Australia) Heres the readers question: Is it the case that the journalist is inputting the word Well in order to make the quote from Federer more understandable as he left the word out in his verbal quote or rather that the word well is referring to an unknown group of people and the reader is to assume who the people are? What appears to be the original quotation appears at Yahoo Sports. The story is credited to AP tennis writer Howard Fendrich: Ask Federer to rank who the best players in history are and he won’t take the bait, saying something like what he said in Australia this week: â€Å"Probably never quite know who was the greatest of all-time in tennis, and I think that’s quite intriguing as well.† Writer Fendrich avoids the problem of correcting the conversational original by placing it after a colon. The reader can assume that all the words within the quotation marks are exactly what Federer said. In the ABC story, a writer or an editor preferred to use the he said construction so the bracketed [Well] was inserted. Thats ok. The brackets announce that the contraction did not appear in Federers original comment. However, if one reader found this Well confusing, chances are that others did too. A third site using the Federer quotation uses the Well and drops the brackets: Well probably never quite know who was the greatest of all time in tennis, and I think thats quite intriguing as well, he said. TVNZ Different genres have different requirements. The writer of narrative non-fiction has the leeway to improve quotations. The writer of straight news has an obligation to quote exactly. The transformation of the Federer quotation is interesting, not because it resulted in any major misrepresentation of what he said, but because it shows how quotations can mutate in the media. Direct quotations enliven writing, but sometimes an indirect quotation that embeds a few words of the original may be a more accurate, less confusing way to go. For example: Federer declined to rank the greatest all-time tennis players. He said that because of generational differences, we can never quite know who was the greatest. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Punctuation category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:When to use "on" and when to use "in"What is Dative Case?Uses of the Past Participle