Perfectly Reasonable Question No. 1: On Direct Quotations in Articles

A reader, Edward Hershey of Portland, Ore., wrote to me some time ago about an article in Sports by the basketball writer Howard Beck. Mr. Hershey, who described himself as “a former sportswriter in the Red Smith-Jimmy Cannon era,” wondered about Mr. Beck’s use of a quotation from the Miami Heat forward LeBron James. It came deep within what he accurately called “a compelling deadline story following the first game of the N.B.A. championship series.”

It read:

“You don’t have no rhythm of what they’re going to do,” James said before tipoff. “They don’t have a rhythm of what we’re going to do. So it’s like the first test we’ve had with one another in a while.”

Mr. Hershey asks a good question about what he terms “careless grammar from a superstar who clearly knows better, based on his next two sentences.”

“Should Beck have cleaned it up, as we used to say after one of Mickey Mantle’s barely decipherable observations, turning ‘no’ into ‘a,’ or would that have violated Times policy?” Mr. Hershey wrote in an e-mail.

The answer, according to both Mr. Beck and the associate managing editor for standards, Philip B. Corbett, is pretty simple. (I asked them both about this several weeks ago.) The Times doesn’t change direct quotations and saw no objection to using the full quotation, as is. If that’s the way the basketball star said it, that’s how the quotation should read in The Times.

The Times’s stylebook, a guide used by editors and reporters throughout the newsroom, puts it this way in its “quotations” entry: “Readers have a right to assume that every word between quotation marks is what the speaker or writer said. The Times does not ‘clean up’ quotations.”

The guide goes on to say that anything other than that - “approximate” quotations â€" can undermine readers’ trust in The Times. However, it adds, “The writer should, of course, omit extraneous syllables like ‘um’ and may judiciously delete false starts.”

One way around this particular example was to paraphrase. That might have worked in the first part of the quotation, though something would have been lost, too. As it was, I don’t think anyone would judge LeBron James harshly for his grammatical slip, as long as his midrange jump shot was working. (It clearly was in the N.B.A. finals.)

I appreciate Mr. Hershey’s question, as I do all of what I like to call the “perfectly reasonable questions” that come my way from careful Times readers. I wish I could answer them all, but the volume of e-mails to the public editor’s office makes that impossible. But, as I prepare to go off the grid on Friday - abandoning a laptop for a kayak - I hope to get to a number of them. Stay tuned for more in the course of the next couple of days.