A recent News & Observer story from Robeson County brought up an interesting question about journalistic practice: Should the newspaper clean up the bad grammar of the people it quotes?

The issue was raised by reader Claire Curran of Chapel Hill:

"A few times this year I have noticed a subject being quoted using very poor grammar; ... in the article about violence in Lumberton, there were multiple examples: 'They was good friends.' 'They killed my young'un for slam nothing.' "

Curran, who is a member of The N&O's Community Panel, said she had previously noted similar verbatim quoting of raw vernacular in the paper's coverage of Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympics bomber captured in the mountains of North Carolina in 2003. "Frankly, I was a bit offended, because I am from Western North Carolina and thought that these quotes would be cleaned up by a reporter or editor under different circumstances but were used because it fits the stereotype of mountain ignorance."

What's the journalistic practice? she asked. Here are some responses:

Staff writer Kristin Collins wrote the Robeson County story about Lumbee Indians trying to stop violence in their community. She said cleaning up the quotes, especially the "slam nothing" phrasing, would have drained authenticity from the story. "The speaker's voice would have been lost," she said in an e-mail. "Plus, it speaks to the lack of education that is one of the main problems in the tribe."

Steve Merelman, her editor, said: "I generally like my reporters to quote people as they speak, unless their meaning is unclear, in which case I prefer a paraphrase. It's accurate, for one thing, and it also lends the texture of real life to our reporting."

The N&O does have a style policy on changing direct quotes: Don't do it. "Especially in a media age where people can instantly hear the original quotes on radio or online or see on television, accuracy is essential, and deciding to 'clean up' a quote has potential ethical ramifications," said Chuck Small, deputy news editor, who helps oversee the paper's copy editors.

"What we would do on the copy desk if this question came up would be either to paraphrase (the preferred method) or, if the quote is so essential but one or two words are deemed to need to be adjusted, to bracket the words to indicate they were not a part of the speaker's original quote. (Example: 'They [were] good friends.') That carries its own risks of seeming condescending, etc., so we don't use it often."

That's a change in practice from my own reporting and editing days at The N&O, more than a decade ago. Then, we were taught that it was acceptable to change "ain't" to "isn't" to save a good quote but spare embarrassment to the speaker.

I wondered: What do they teach in journalism school these days? Jan Johnson Yopp, senior associate dean at the UNC Journalism School, said students there are taught never to alter direct quotes and to avoid using vernacular. The exception would be feature stories where colorful phrasing conveys a flavor important to the story.

"In news stories, writers who are quoting sources are better off using indirect quotes if poor grammar is used, unless keeping the poor grammar in a direct quote is necessary to the story," she said.

But paraphrasing and indirect quoting do run the risk of blanching the color out of stories, as Collins points out. Reporters like detail, including local idiom, that helps paint a picture for their stories. But you can go too far and put people in a bad light. We have an obligation to people we cover, particularly nonpublic figures not savvy about the media, not to abuse publicly the private identity they entrust us with.

My gut is to put myself in the place of the speaker. Would she or he feel misused to read the quote in the paper? If so, paraphrase. Otherwise, use the quote.

In the case of the Lumbee story, I think we could have reworded "They was good friends" without loss of verisimilitude. Had I spoken that quote, I wouldn't have wanted to see it in print.

But "They killed my young'un for slam nothing" expressed more eloquently the sorrow and loss of a child's violent death than a paraphrase could ever have done. That's local dialect, not bad grammar, and it adds to the story without harming the speaker.

The Public Editor column last week was about criticism of The N&O's front page for straying from serious journalism and neglecting national and world news. Executive editor Melanie Sill took issue with the column in her blog, which you can read at http://blogs.newsobserver.com/editor/index.php. The original column can be seen at www.newsobserver.com, key word: Vaden.

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