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Journalists use brackets within quotations to put words in people's mouths. This isn't necessarily a bad thing! Sometimes journalists have to insert words to help to clarify a statement. Brackets are often used to identify ambiguous pronouns in a direct quotation. For example: "They [the 8th Federal Infantry] fought bravely under the most adverse circumstances during the Civil War." You can also use brackets to properly place a quote within the syntax of a sentence. To decapitalize a word, for example, "Doctor Fielding's written opinion states that '[p]atients are often deceitful.'" Square brackets are also used in
conjunction with the "[sic]" punctuation, which is a way of distancing yourself from a misstatement or a misspelling. For example, "The Delaware River is indeed a truly majestic site [sic]." Finally, to quote usage guru Bryan Garner (and conveniently use square brackets in the process), "[Square brackets] enclose comments, corrections, explanations, interpolations, notes, or translations that were not in the original text but have been added by subsequent authors, editors, or others."
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