Monday, March 10, 2008

What to do with a bad quote?

There are lots of tips to get a good interview; obviously taking good notes, and knowing what you after, but you shouldn’t talk for more than 10 minutes, right? However, what do you do, if you do every thing you are supposed to do, and you still couldn’t get a good quote because of the poor grammar of your interviewee? Should you clean up the source’s quote or only run quotes verbatim? As hard as it may sound, it is a possibility, and one should be prepared at all times, and have alternate ways to solve this problem because after all you need your work published, and quotes are indeed a great gift to your story. Hence the best option would be to just paraphrase because if the interviewee can’t give a clear quote, it is better to use your own words instead of trying to run quotes verbatim which sometimes may sound awkward and make no sense.