Tag Archives: generative ai

When a Bredemarket client was reviewing my draft, the client asked about my use of parentheses around individual letters.

“what is the purpose of the “()” in the “(L)eading organizations…” and “(G)en AI…“?”

So I explained.

“I would have to confirm, but presumably the original text said “leading” and “gen.” To properly use the quote as a partial quote I capitalized the words, but enclosed them in parentheses to indicate I modified the original text.”

But I thought I’d better check to see if I was right. Which is good, because I wasn’t. Nancy Lewis in Writing Commons:

“When writers insert or alter words in a direct quotation, square brackets—[ ]—are placed around the change. The brackets, always used in pairs, enclose words intended to clarify meaning, provide a brief explanation, or to help integrate the quote into the writer’s sentence.  A common error writers make is to use parentheses in place of brackets.”

Well, at least I’m not the only one. Lewis also provided several examples, including this one:

“[D]riving is not as automatic as one might think; in fact, it imposes a heavy procedural workload [visual and motor demands] on cognition that . . . leaves little processing capacity available for other tasks” (Salvucci and Taatgen 107).

I just corrected my client’s piece before publication, and will try to remember to use brackets as needed in all pieces day forward. I’m not going to go back through the hundreds of blog posts here and correct them.