Dreyer's English - Benjamin Dreyer 2022

Brackets
56 assorted things to do (and not to do) with punctuation
The stuff in the front

32.

Brackets—or square brackets, as they’re called by people who call parentheses round brackets—serve a limited but crucial purpose.

First: If you find yourself making a parenthetical comment within a parenthetical comment, the enclosed parenthetical comment is set within brackets. But it’s extraordinarily unattractive on the page (I try to find a way around it [I mean, truly, do you like the way this looks?], at least whenever I can), so avoid it.

Second: Anytime you find yourself sticking a bit of your own text into quoted material (a helpfully added clarifying first name, for instance, when the original text contained only a surname) or in any other way altering a quotation, you must—and I mean must—enclose your added words in brackets.

Ah, yes, there’s an exception, as there always is: If in the context of what you’re writing you need to change, in quoted material, a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence to a lowercase one, or vice versa, you may do that without brackets.

That is, if you’re quoting Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Wait for It” from Hamilton, which says “Love doesn’t discriminate / Between the sinners / And the saints / It takes and it takes and it takes / And we keep loving anyway,” you’re well within your rights to refer to Miranda’s assertion that “love doesn’t discriminate” rather than his assertion that “[l]ove doesn’t discriminate.”

And in the other direction, quoting Miranda from In the Heights, “Reports of my fame are greatly exaggerated / Exacerbated by the fact that my syntax is highly complicated ’cause / I emigrated from the single greatest little place in the Caribbean,” you’re allowed to do this:

“My syntax is highly complicated,” Miranda’s character comments.

Rather than this:

“[M]y syntax is highly complicated,” Miranda’s character comments.

33.

[Sic] Burns

—

Let’s take a moment to talk about [sic]. Sic is Latin for “thus,” and it’s used—traditionally in italics, always in brackets—in quoted material to make it clear to the reader that a misspelling or eccentricity or error of fact came from the person you’re quoting, not from you. As, for instance and strictly speaking, you might do here, in quoting this piece of text I 100 percent made up out of thin air and didn’t find on, say, Twitter:

Their [sic] was no Collusion [sic] and there was no Obstruction [sic].

Essentially you’re saying yes, I know this is wrong, but that’s how it was written, so it’s not my fault.

But seriously now:

If you’re quoting a lot of, say, seventeenth-century writing in which there are numerous old-fashioned-isms you wish to retain, you’d do well, somewhere around the beginning of what you’re writing, perhaps in an author’s note or a footnote, to make it clear that you’re quoting your venerable material verbatim. That’ll save you a lot of [sic]ing, though you might occasionally drop in a [sic] for an error or peculiarity whose misreading or misinterpretation might truly be confusing to your reader.

Writers of nonfiction occasionally choose, when they’re quoting a good deal of archaic or otherwise peculiar material, to silently correct outdated spellings or misspellings, irregular capitalization, unusual or missing punctuation, etc.—that is, to simply impose modern spelling and grammar rules without telling the reader they’re doing it. I’m not a huge fan of this practice—mostly because I think it’s not as much fun as retaining all that flavorful weirdness—though I can understand why you might do it in a work of nonfiction that’s meant to be popular rather than scholarly. If you’re going to do it, again, let the reader know up front. It’s only fair.

Do not—not as in never—use [sic] as a snide comment to suggest that something you’re quoting is dopey. By which I mean the very meaning of the words, not merely their spelling. You may think you’re getting in a good shot at a writer whose judgment you find shaky; the only person whose judgment is going to seem shaky is you.

It’s the prose equivalent of using scare quotes (see this page) or wearing an I’M WITH STUPID T-shirt, and just about as charming.