[anon98356]

Is that the standard syntax? I've always been led to believe square brackets are used to insert words that don't exist in the quote.

> "go home and bite my [his] pillow."

To me makes way more sense. If I was to read "go home and bite [his] pillow." I would assume the person being quoted had said ""go home and bite pillow." which makes almost no sense.

[ghusbands]

Yes, it is standard. Search the thread for MLA or manual. Academic papers are done this way and have been for a long time, and it's not hard to understand.

[ddingus]

I've not seen a paper with it yet, and doing it introduces an ambiguity into an otherwise clean, parsable syntax. And frankly, doing that is completely unnecessary. Adds pretty much zero value, and is presumptuous.

I am quite sure you can show me one too, and the point being this isn't in broad use just yet. Should not be.

Frankly, this reminds me of the one space after sentence mess. Similar reasons have been given. It reads better! It flows better! You get the idea here.

But, ever notice how often your mobile device gets capitalization wrong?

This is why!

The same people who thought cleaning up that one space made sense did not think through the parsing implications. One space means we no longer have a way to differentiate an end to a sentence from an abbreviation.

That nice, clean space has already cost untold human hours spent on hobbled user input. Your phone literally has no way to capitalize in a more effective, assistive way. (same goes for any code assistant depending on that information, which is lost in the one space after sentence scenario.)

Here we have a similar thing. If the brackets are allowed to overwrite quoted material, then we lose the ability to differentiate some of how brackets are used, which means we've made our language and grammar more ambiguous, and for what?

The example given in the article highlights this perfectly!

Given the use: go home and bite [his] pillow

Did Corky say, "go home and bite pillow" , or was something else said, and if something else was said, what was it, and why was it not simply quoted?

[anon98356]

MLA is a standard, not the only standard. Just becase a significant portion of universities/academic instituitions have adopted it as their standard doesn't make it the worldwide standard at all. It doesn't even make it the standard for all academia.

Further Esquire is not an acadmic journal so should probably conform to a more widerly used understanding of how quotes are recorded/put in context.

[ddingus]

Exactly!

Brackets do not modify the quote at all. Subtract them, and the original expression is intact, verbatim.