What do the parenthesis mean in a written quote?

Question

Whenever someone is quoted in the newspaper or a magazine a few of the words have parenthesis around them, How come?

Answer 1

There are really two sets of parentheses that you may be talking about: the classic "(...)" or the brackets "[...]."

When they use any parentheses at all you can assume that the speaker didn't actually say those words, but the author thinks it's important to include them for some reason. Most of the time the words are included to edit the person's statement to make it more clear or flow with the text around the quote.

The only case I've seen the classic ones used is to state a reference. Example: "Worker understanding is critical to effective training (Sanders-Smith, "Hispanic Worker Safety," PROFESSIONAL SAFETY, Feb, 2007)." So you know who said the statement originally and where you can find it published.

Brackets are more common in newspapers as they are generally used for a couple of purposes.

The first is word substitution. A fire broke out in a house and someone said "I think it started at 9pm." The newspaper may substitute for the word "it" in its article to be more clear for a reader. Example: A bystander stated, "I think [the fire] started at 9pm."

The second is word inclusion. If someone is talking, he/she isn't usually thinking about perfect grammar. Occassionally someone may skip a key word or mess up a phrase, and to make sure the reader gets the whole meaning, a journalist will add what's missing. This is harder to give an example of but I'll try. A student is talking about a difficult test and says literally, "this...uh...well...I didn't know what to do, so I put anything." The journalist may write in his/her article: a student said yesterday, "This [test was difficult]; I didn't know what to do, so I put anything."

Most journalists want to avoid altering to many quotes or major elements of quotes because it can lower their credibility. Most times they are harmless and very helpful substitutions but be careful of tabloids that do this as they are the biggest culprits of misquoting people.

Answer 2

The quotes indicate an exact accounting of what was said.
The same words appear in exactly the same order, with no paraphrasing, substitution, or abbreviation of any kind, not even any trivial changes that wouldn't have affected the meaning in any way.
It is a verbatim account of what was said.
tc

Answer 3

They're generally bracketed. This means that they've paraphrased what the person said. For example, if someone points to the sky and says "It's gray", the newspaper would write "[The sky's] gray".

Answer 4

Those words were not in the actual quote, but were added by the writer of the interview to clarify the words of the one giving the quote.

Answer 5

Because they didn't leterally say the words but thats what they meant or implied... for example, if quoting someone who was speaking about tescos... the quote might go "... because they (Tesco's) didn't need the workforce they had in place at the time."

Answer 6

it is kinda the writers way of explaining what the person being quoted was talking about. Something you may not could understand by reading.

Answer 7

I think it means that they didn't actually say the words in the brackets but that was what they were talking about.

Answer 8

What Do Parentheses Mean

Answer 9

An extra information, an example or an explanation of something that has been said before...