Exact Words

A quote is a person's exact words inside marks. A paraphrase is the same information told in your words, with no marks. Both must be true; only one claims to be word-for-word. If you write “The game is canceled,” said Coach Diaz, the coach must have said exactly that. If what she really said was longer and messier, keep the marks off and write: Coach Diaz said the game is canceled.

The rule to memorize: never change words inside marks. Not to fix grammar, not to shorten, not to make anyone sound better. Outside the marks, your words; inside, theirs.

Two forms carry speech onto the page. A direct quote puts the speaker's exact words inside quotation marks. A paraphrase restates the point in your own words, without marks, still credited to the speaker. The test for choosing between them: is the wording itself the news? “We failed those families” earns its marks; the schedule for the road repaving does not. Either way, attribution — said Mayor Ortiz, according to the audit — tells the reader who stands behind the statement.

Inside the marks, nothing may change. You may quote a fragment — the mayor called the plan “a quiet disaster” — and you may shorten with an ellipsis, but only if the trimmed version stays fair to what the speaker meant. The moment a cut changes the meaning, the marks are telling a lie.

Quotation is a chain-of-custody claim: these words passed from the speaker's mouth to your page intact. That is why standards desks allow so little surgery — brackets for a clarifying word, as in “we told [the council] in March,” an ellipsis for a fair cut, and nothing else. Cleaning up grammar, tightening phrasing, swapping in a synonym: each produces a sentence the speaker never said, published under their name.

Context is part of the contract. A sarcastic remark printed straight, an answer moved under a different question, a hypothetical presented as a position — the words can be letter-perfect and the quote still false. Fair context means the reader understands the words the way a person in the room would have.

Quotation marks go around words someone really said. “I lost my red mitten,” said Amy. Amy said those very words. The marks are a promise to the reader.

If Amy said mitten, you may not write glove. If you do not need her very words, tell it your own way — no marks — and say Amy told you.

Attribution does more than assign credit; it exposes the epistemic status of every sentence. The bridge failed at 6:40 a.m., according to the incident report tells the reader what kind of evidence sits beneath the claim and where to check it. Unattributed assertions ask for trust; attributed ones offer a trail. The craft convention — said over claimed, admitted, or insisted — keeps the verb from quietly editorializing about the speaker's honesty.

The quote-or-paraphrase decision is an information decision. Direct quotation preserves voice, emphasis, and deniability-proof wording, at the cost of length and clarity; paraphrase compresses and clarifies at the cost of texture. The working rule: quote when the wording is evidence — admissions, characterizations, promises — and paraphrase when only the underlying fact matters.

The legal floor sits at Masson v. New Yorker (1991): deliberately altering a quotation can constitute actual malice where the change materially alters the meaning of what was said. The Court declined to require verbatim fidelity — rational interpretation of ambiguous remarks survives — but a fabricated sentence inside marks, attributed to a real speaker, is defamation's raw material.

Beneath the doctrine lies a linguistic distinction: direct discourse asserts the utterance itself as a fact of the world; indirect discourse asserts only the proposition expressed. Newsroom fidelity rules are an institutional answer to the gap between the two — a discipline for occasions when the token, not merely the proposition, is the evidence. Studies of transcription practice show that even careful reporters regularize speech; the rules exist because drift is the default, not the exception.