Journalists or English majors

[Nocturnal]

Why do articles often times enclose a word between brackets such as [this]?

Does that imply that they did not say that particular word but that they mean it?

 

[sobriquet]

It's an editorial addition [for clarification or correction].

 

[Farang]

Replaces a word or phrase in a quotation to better fit the sentence it is used in.

For example, "Our group hates the killing of the cheeseburger police."

Their group, which before "[hated] the killing of the cheeseburger police," now says it hates cheeseburgers.

edit: actually that isn't the best example but I think you get my point.

 

[AFB]

Original: We walked into the story and were immediately insulted. They are a bunch of hosiers.
Fixed : We walked into the story and were immediately insulted. [The employees] are a bunch of hosiers.

 

[AtlantaBob]

As the only (as far as I can tell) official English major on this thread:

"yes, you've got it right."

Same thing happens if you change the capitalization on a quote.

Assume that Benson wrote: "Going to school is good for you."

You might write:

As Benson has said, "[g]oing to school is good for you."

It's an indication that the editor has changed something without really changing the substance of what was being said.

 

[Agentbolt]

It's more a Journalism thing than an English thing (Journo major here) but yes, what they're telling you is correct.

 

[Farang]

Originally posted by: AtlantaBob
As the only (as far as I can tell) official English major on this thread:

"yes, you've got it right."

Same thing happens if you change the capitalization on a quote.

Assume that Benson wrote: "Going to school is good for you."

You might write:

As Benson has said, "[g]oing to school is good for you."

It's an indication that the editor has changed something without really changing the substance of what was being said.

Interesting you replace a single letter. As far as I've seen/used, your sentence would be "[going] to school is good for you." I'm going to have to look into this because I am that bored.

edit: actually as far as I've seen/used, you can mostly ignore matters of punctuation if it doesn't change the meaning. I'm still interested to see if changing a single letter is accepted, though.