Mark my words: quote unquote

It is the source of some of the most lively disagreements on any editorial floor employing people from different English speaking cultures: what to do about direct quotes that ramble, confuse, mislead. Should the spoken word be sacred and untouchable, or does powerful non-fiction provide a common sense option? This was the topic of the latest My Word column in The National, Abu Dhabi ...

If a law were passed restricting each person’s collection of books to a single category, my choice would be wartime France. Military matters hold no interest, but I devour everything I find on the fall of Paris, the activities of the Resistance, undercover work by French-speaking agents and ordinary life at a time of occupation or collaboration.

Two books I have recently read describe the experiences of women imprisoned, and tortured or otherwise mistreated, by the Nazis.

In Agnès Humbert’s own story, and Jerrard Tickell’s biography of Odette Brailly, numerous conversations are reproduced as if recorded by a stenographer present when they took place. We can all speculate on how much licence was used.

Ultimately, the reader makes a judgement: is this author trustworthy and does the direct speech, though not verbatim, capture the likely tone and sense of what was said?

If the practice is acceptable in literature, why should it not also apply to journalism? The very idea would provoke howls of indignation from some colleagues, especially North Americans.

It is true that if we attribute remarks to an individual, the words should generally be those spoken.

But what if the speaker makes a hash of verb forms or sentence construction? Faithfully quoted, the words may make the meaning unclear or, worse, different from what was intended.
It is sometimes possible to go back for clarification. If the speaker cannot be contacted again, two legitimate remedies exist: to make slight amendments, removing ambiguity or garble; or to convert the actual words used into reported speech.

There is another option, one favoured by many Americans and Canadians. That is to use ellipses to indicate that some words are missing (though the reader does not know how many), and parentheses to denote what was meant but not said. Both devices signal beyond doubt that the speaker is, strictly speaking, being misquoted.
Ethically, this may be no worse than tweaking the quote to render it intelligible; it is surely no better. Often enough, the end product is also a confusing mess.

When I worked in France, I struggled at first with the task of putting written or spoken French into English. Literal translation could produce convoluted or even nonsensical text.

I explained my predicament to a seasoned Paris correspondent. “But that isn’t the hardest part of the job,” he said. “It’s the easiest.”
This was not his way of saying we could just make it up. His point was that instead of grappling with linguistic riddles, we should choose the nearest appropriate phrase, ensuring only that the original meaning remained intact.

Profanity presents a related dilemma. Should we print the first letter of the word, followed by a dash or asterisk for each omitted letter? If this merely prompts the reader to “think” the word, is it wiser to use a random number of characters without the initial?
On balance, I prefer the second option, or a third excluding the offending word but stating that strong language had been used. There are exceptions. If some highly prominent or revered person utters an expletive, the circumstances, or interests of history, may require it be published, or at least made clear.

On the broader question, it is occasionally necessary to publish an individual or organisation’s statement in full, warts and all.
But what do people who have been quoted by the press, or are likely to be, think about this? And what about readers who may never encounter journalists, but expect the highest standards of accuracy? It is the one certainty of this discussion that their views matter more than mine.

Comments

[Bill Taylor]

Journalism is not literature and literature is seldom journalism.
Having worked in journalism on both sides of the Atlantic, I'm much more comfortable with the North American practice of staying as true to the quote as possible, even if it means using ellipses and/or parentheses. Ethically, it is very much preferable to "tweaking" the quote.
Experience has shown me that many "tweakers" have no idea when to stop and what is reported winds up bearing little resemblance to what was actually said.
Ethics at this point becomes little more than a county to the north of Thuthex.

[louise]

Have a look at this blog

www.unnecessaryquotes.com

[Bill Taylor]

Ouch! That's almost as bad as misplaced apostrophes. I love the one offering "wines," though.

[louise]

Not quite as bad as "wine's"!

[Tim]

I agree Colin: for a reader, accuracy must be foremost.

What is she/he being quoted trying to convey? That’s what readers must surely want to know. That will invariably mean reporting quotes – from, for example, such verbally-challenged figures as John Prescott and George Bush - in indirect speech. And, yes, that relies on journalistic skills – although it’s more likely to be a publication’s own left/right leaning.

However, you can’t beat direct speech (or on-the-spot images for that matter) for character revelations, for Freudian slips and for being great material for cartoonists, comics and cynics.

As for people who see their words reported in the next day’s newspaper, I bet nearly all will spit angrily they have been quoted out of context.

You’re on a hiding to nothing.

[Amalia Costin]

Thank you for bringing up this issue as I find myself debating, reviewing and explaining various points about the English language on a daily basis. With regard to the use or, shall we say, the preservation of the apostrophe in English, I insist that people should show more respect to the little thing.

First of all, I am not a native speaker of English. I am Romanian and I studied English in school since grade six. Reading your article, I recalled a few learning situations when the apostrophe helped to clarify the meaning of words that sounded the same (e.g. its/it's, your/you're, etc.). To the unaccustomed eye and ear of a foreigner who tries to understand the form and structure of a new language, the apostrophe makes a salutary difference. In other words, it's useful because it helps to keep words separate and clarify their meaning.

Secondly, when used as a genitive mark, it is crucial to the meaning of the text in question, as it is used both for singular and plural nouns in the genitive case. Example: the king's horses and the kings' horses as opposed to the kings horsesand the kings horses. In the first set, the apostrophe clearly indicates the number of kings (How would we know if a history book talks about a king's horses or both or more kings' horses, if we didn't use the apostrophe? Context does not always help...), whereas in the second set, in the case when we should get rid of it, the words do not mean anything as they are... In the case when we shouldn't care about its use, the three words quoted may look like the king's horse's or the kings horse's or the kings' horses', etc. Needless to say, lexical and semantical chaos!

There are more examples, but I believe those above are enough to prove the bottom line, which is that the apostrophe serves multiple functions, it's not there only for form or for show. Its main function is that it stands for something, it replaces one or more letters that are exluded in verbal communication (I'm = I am, you'll = you will). Another function is to show possessives of nouns and some pronouns (friend's, someone's, everybody's, etc.), and finally, to form the plural of lowercase letters (to keep one's t's separate from one's d's). These being said, I know from my interaction with both native and non-native English speakers that most of them do NOT know these rules and after I pointed them out to some of them, they did not repeat their apostrophe mistakes! Once you know the rule, it's easy and it makes sense. If teachers would only take three minutes, one for each rule, to explain and exemplify these very simple rules, I am convinced it would save people a lot of recurrent confusion in writing, a lot of frustration in reading and it would do justice to the morphological variety of the English language.

I would like to ask you, as a native speaker, what does it feel like to see constantly misspelled words, such as "sometime's" instead of "sometimes"? "Book's" instead of "books"? Or "Your beautiful!" Uhm, my beautiful what?... As I said, I am not a native speaker, but I have a BA degree in English (and Norwegian) from a US college, although I cemented my knowledge of English at a university in Romania before I travelled to the USA, and I feel both frustrated with the poor English skills of different kinds of people we meet here and sorry for the language itself, as it is mangled and abused in ways that I did not think possible until I came to the UAE two years ago... Moreover, I have noticed that most native speakers cannot care less when they hear or see something mispronounced or written wrong, which helps to perpetuate many defective ways of speaking English, most of which are already entrenched in official texts, as well as in the daily usage in the UAE. How about "too much expensive"? Or "I must to go now"? Or the misuse of "also" in negative sentences: "My boss also didn't know." I try to correct the recidivists as much as I can, but they do not always accept my observations, saying that nobody from the UK told them that... Bam! It's shocking to see how many people prefer the comfort of their ignorance to upgrading their knowledge, but well, no need to argue, as the Cranberries might remind me in such a case......

I wanted to mention this to you, because I believe that native speakers are the primary guardians of their language (and through it, of their cultural heritage), so an article on the duty of every native speaker to cast whatever amount of light they can into the darkness in which so many non-native speakers are fumbling would go a long way in improving communication and expediting things in this country. Here's an example from my experience: I work as a Client Relations Manager for a law firm in Dubai and, because of my Arabic skills, our lawyers ask me to review files in English and then brief them on the main points in Arabic. I must confess that many times I have to guess from the jumble of incoherent words and misleading punctuation (how ironic! punctuation is intended to assist readers, not mislead them...) the message that each paragraph seeks to convey and I can only dream of how nice it would be if the job of drafting important official documents was left to educated speakers of the language (whether native or non-native).

I hope the apostrophe gets to keep the place it deserves in the language. In my view, there are other things that are redundant or unnecessary in English, with the comma topping my list of linguistic grievances. I speak several languages, i.e. the main European languages and Arabic, and in none of them does the comma shock and stop the reader as much as it does in English. So rather than demonizing the good old apostrophe, let's focus on its ground-floor twin, the insidious comma, which causes far more serious and widespread problems, particularly because it's spread in the wrong places...

PS.. after I read your article last week, I decided to skip or misplace all the apostrophes in a memo that I had to send to my colleagues, just to see the reaction (or simply to see if there was going to be any reaction...). To my delight, almost all of them, including those with limited English skills, dashed to my office with printouts of the email, emailed back or called immediately to express their indignation, revulsion, confusion and even concern for my mental state that morning... What is this, Miss Amalia? Is this how we write this? Have the rules changed? Are you ok? So I, for one, am not concerned about the extinction of the apostrophe and I can only say that those who would rather do without it simply don't know or can't understand the rules...