If I were reporting it, I would render it as a much shorter quote and paraphrase the rest.
“I personally believe that US Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps,” said Upton, listing a world’s tour of destinations —South Africa, Iraq, “the asian countries”—about which Americans should be better educated.
It is editorializing in its own way, sure.
I find myself conflicted about ⊥rump…
I have derived considerable delight at mocking his word salad transcripts. But I wonder now if those verbatim transcriptions of his speeches are unfair.
It is marginally easier to follow his meaning when I watch the video, although most of his ideas are even more nauseating when accompanied by his voice.
I suppose the distinction is that ⊥rump doesn’t so much abuse filler words, as filler sentence fragments. He’ll seemingly abandon a point he’s trying to make and insert upwards of half a dozen barely tangentially related parenthetical comments before finally, finally getting back ‘round to the point he seemingly abandoned 100 words ago.
Trump’s rambling is so extreme it’s very hard to quote without either making him seem to speak much more directly than he is, or falling into the trap this post was about. He tends to be quoted very briefly and paraphrased at length.
It’s like quoting bagpipes.
With the interviewing I’ve done as an academic, I always transcribe the interview exactly like the recording. I don’t correct grammar or take out fillers because I feel it is classist to do so. However, when I write the articles and use quotes from the interviews I’ve done, I always send the article to the participants to review and ask them if they appreciate the way that they’re represented. If they want the filler words taken out then I take them out. If they don’t, I dont. They’re not my words to edit, they belong to the person who spoke them and it’s up to them to decide.
yeah… quoting a randomly picked sentence from him makes him sound like he actually thought about or means what he is saying, but in context it is often stream of consciousness, sometimes contradictory, sometimes him explaining vague intuitive viewpoints backed up with random lies, mis-remembered hearsay and BS. Sometimes I almost feel like the reporting takes him too seriously because I dont think he even is serious or believes half of what he says. Real Trump reporting has to dig deeper into what is motivating him to say what he is saying rather than the words themselves. Which goes back to my original point that quoting him directly doesnt serve much journalistic purpose.
In my magazine-writing days I did hundreds of interviews, and while most of them were not primarily used to produce quotations, I did have to consider how to handle the actual words when quotations were called for. For business stories in which the point was the data–how exactly did an engineer or marketing manager describe a product or function–I had no problem with editing in the direction of standard English. But in cases where the interviewee’s voice mattered, I might not go too far beyond cutting the ums and ers and minor backtracks and the NYT’s “false starts.”
Interviews conducted as interviews (as distinct from information-gathering sessions) got that treatment precisely because part of what was being offered was personality and voice, and the only means to signal that was through actual language. If I were transcribing the Martosko example, the the ums would go but most of the “likes” would stay. Though, to be fair and accurate, the kid does lapse into near-incoherence in the middle (“she just like presents themselves to be like, so like negative towards like minorities and stuff like that”) before figuring out what point is being headed for (Trump’s mockery is “really freaking dumb”).
Thought experiment: How might one edit an interview with Trump? Seems to me that understanding his personality and even his truthfulness might require an unvarnished representation of his actual speech patterns. (Myself, I’m pretty sure I can tell exactly when he strays from a prepared statement just from the audio. The guy’s verbal tells are pretty obvious.)
I’m not arguing against the proposition that the decision to present this kid’s opinion in its entirety amounts to editorializing, but, hey, it’s the Daily Mail, so it’s not like Martosko is a documentarian.
Related:
A photo editor would get similar flack for using a photo where the subject was blinking. It doesn’t matter that the photo is physically “true”. In the context of a news story, it can be deeply misleading.
And it would be especially so, if it was captioned to make the reader believe the subject was asleep.
(I don’t think this has anything to do with eye-mouths, which clearly are only ever intended to reveal the subject’s true likeness, not obscure it.)
No, because we will still subconsciously edit out the filler unless it is excessive.
Oh man. And “right” has become this decade’s unavoidable, chummy shorthand for, “You know? Do you know what I mean? Don’t you agree?” As if the speaker is there with us, right? Experiencing the story, and getting the point, at the same time we do, right? We’ve all been there, right?
I’m talking to you, NPR!
Ahh… I’m – uh – staying out of this one.
People from literate families generally are taught not to use filler words.
A reporter who quotes filler words is stealing space from other writers’ stories.
Not all who use filler words are dogs** dumb. I watched two intelligent mid-sized city TV newsmen, one with decades of experience, pause, stutter, and insert fillers after the murders of six Chattanooga servicemen. Nothing in that corrupt but quiet city had prepared them for such reporting. No blame should be assigned for their verbal indecision. Odds are that New York and New Jersey reporters did the same on 9/11, and to hell with anyone who would quote an “Umm…” on these occasions.
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