Your classmate Alex Sakariassen did some research on news organizations' policies on correcting minor grammatical errors in quotations. Here's what he found:Although no journalist I questioned believed changing quotations should be a regular practice at any publication, some danced closer to the line than others. From the highest echelon of United States journalism down to the local daily, the answer to the above question seems to be “it depends.”
“We don’t clean up grammar in quotes, but if it’ll make someone look stupid we’ll paraphrase it,” said Don Podesta, assistant managing editor of the Washington Post copy desk.
According to Podesta, the Post has developed a clear-cut policy on the issue. He said copy editors will clean up language to avoid making sources look uneducated or foolish, but that any changes to the quote’s content is forbidden.
One of the few times the Post will include incorrect grammar is to emphasize a regional dialect pivotal in a story. Sometimes, Podesta added, a story will involve a particularly sensitive source such as a foreigner or someone for whom English is not a first language. Even then, it's a rare practice.
“We try not to quote dialect or accents,” he said.
Bill Fink, a spokesman for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, said his paper’s policy’s is similar to Washington Post’s. Unless a grammatical error is particularly important to the story, the Post-Intelligencer will avoid using the quotation by paraphrasing. If dealing with a prominent political or official source, the Post-Intelligencer will hold the source accountable for his or her word choice and not shy away from using quotes that make the source look foolish or uneducated.
But under no circumstances will editors or reporters change a grammatical error in a quotation, Fink said.
In small cities where “everyone knows everyone,” some publications appear to inhabit the No Man’s Land of the issue.
“We don’t have a one-size-fits-all policy on that,” said Missoulian editor Sherry Devlin. “If it’s some minor grammatical error, sometimes I change that.”
Devlin explained that while the Missoulian strives to be accurate in its news coverage, the newspaper does not wish to promote incorrect use of grammar by printing minor errors in stories. “It doesn’t come up that often,” she said.
Some newspapers have broken away from this gray area, however, providing an answer to the question.
“If it’s in quotation marks, it’s what was said,” said Dave Bundy, editor of the Bismarck Tribune.
Bundy said that cleaning up minor errors in quotes used to be a common practice, but that practice is fading out. Now the Tribune solves the problem by using indirect quotations or paraphrases, which Bundy said don’t seem to affect the stories’ reception.
“Readers don’t care if there are quotations or not,” Bundy said. “That’s something we get hung up on.”
He also said that editors like Devlin aren’t necessarily in the wrong, as they aren’t intentionally trying to change the news but rather enhance its presentation.
Even the Associated Press straddles the issue a bit. The first sentence of the quotations entry in the 2006 edition of the AP Stylebook says, “Never alter quotations even to correct minor grammatical errors or word usage.”
However, in the third paragraph of the entry the stylebook says not to “routinely use abnormal spellings such as gonna in attempts to convey regional dialects or mispronunciations.” (
Again, paraphrasing fixes that problem.)
Does this mean journalists who use incorrect grammar in quotes to convey a source’s regional speech patterns are in the wrong? Whose code of journalistic ethics do we follow, and why is it the “right” one?
In the end, we journalists must decide how to present the news in a fair and accurate manner without threatening our integrity or deceiving readers.
We'll gather here occasionally to discuss the verities and vagaries of news editing. I hope you'll find the links on the right helpful, too.
