Attribution of Quotes in Newspaper Writing

Question

Can I please have advice on how to quote the following . For example, I interviewed a witness to an accident who said "This was horrific. There was blood everywhere. It reminded me of my cousin's accident ten years ago when he broke his leg and had to switch to playing a different sport, and his spouse left him. I hope the victim gets immediate attention and others learn from this accident."

Okay, so there was a lot of rambling in between the words I want to quote when I write my article.

I believe I have two options but would love to know more.

1) "This was horrific. There was blood everywhere," he said. "I hope the victim gets immediate attention and others learn from this accident."

2) "This was horrific. There was blood everywhere," he said. "I hope the victim gets immediate attention and others learn from this accident," he added.

I'm confused when I'm interviewing people and they say two sentences which are great, but lots of fluff in between.

I would appreciate any help.

Answer 1

Hi Evan,

You can always paraphrase and then use ellipses ( ... ) to replace the omitted material in a quote, although take care to not use ellipses too often. Even when you use ellipses, the sentence needs to make sense.

For example:

One eyewitness recalled his cousin´s accident that forced him to switch sports after he broke his leg. "This was horrific,¨ he said. ¨There was blood everywhere. . . . I hope the victim gets immediate attention and others learn from this accident."

In this case, the ellipses was at an end of a sentence, so it looked like (. . . .)

Notice that I didn't mention anything about his spouse leaving his cousin in the paraphrased sentence, because I don't know if that's truly relevant to the story. Ask yourself what part of the quote is truly juicy and pertinent. Most people would want a victim to get help, but not everyone was there to see "blood everywhere."

(See what I did there? You can also insert a short quote if the speaker and context is clear in the rest of the paragraph.)

Original quote: "This was horrific. There was blood everywhere. It reminded me of my cousin's accident ten years ago when he broke his leg and had to switch to playing a different sport, and his spouse left him. I hope the victim gets immediate attention and others learn from this accident."