Punctuation Practice: Changing Quotes

Last punctuation challenge!  This is a companion to the practice you did most recently, using ellipses.  The three dots work great for when you need to remove a piece, large or small, from inside a quote.  Sometimes, though, rather than remove things, you need to add things to clarify or complete a grammatical thought.  And that's where brackets come into play: [ ]

Remember, the rule for using a quote is that you have to keep everything inside the quotation marks EXACTLY the same as it appears in the original source.  But what consider how confusing it may be when you run into an unspecified pronoun, like "I love it when he says you should always wear your raincoat."  Who is "he"?

Brackets allow you to make those changes or additions.  You can alter the example either way: 

• "I love it when he [William H. Macy] says you should always wear your raincoat."
• OR "I love it when [William H. Macy] says you should always wear your raincoat."

This website gives you all the possible cases where a set of brackets is useful: http://www.northland.cc.mn.us/owl/Brackets%20rules.htm Links to an external site.

Now, let's try it ourselves.

1. Find a paragraph that uses a quote from your Source Evaluation Essay.
   
2. Practice inserting a set of brackets to alter this quote in a way that makes it more meaningful to your reader.
   
3. Submit the entire paragraph, quote with brackets included, here.  
   

Factors to consider:

• brackets [ ] are quite different than parentheses ( ) and can't be used interchangeably
• [sic] is a common use of brackets inside a quote.  This means the quote has an error or misspelling in it, that you're aware of, but it appears that way in the original.  In other words, if you add [sic] we won't blame a typo on you, but on the source it came from.