A reader writes "What is the purpose of putting brackets around [in a war] in the following sentence: 'The clapping, the appreciation . . . it's important for anyone who was [in a war].'"

The brackets used above are more precisely termed "square brackets" to distinguish them from curly brackets (or braces), { }, which are familiar to most people from mathematical sets. Square brackets can serve a number of purposes in writing, but the most common one is to signal in a quotation that the words they enclose are not part of the verbatim language of the speaker. Thus, in the reader's example, the reporter put them around "in a war" to clarify the intention of the speaker--either because the statement was inherently ambiguous or because the original statement contained a referent to words or ideas not repeated in the portion of the statement being quoted. We may surmise that the original wording probably was something like

"The clapping, the appreciation . . . it's important for everybody who was there."

Presumably the speaker had given this sentence a context by saying something earlier about fighting in a war. But when the reporter chose to include only the later sentence in the story, the referent for the word "there" was lost. Recognizing this, the reporter added the phrase "in a war" to clarify the speaker's meaning. The words fall inside a direct quotation, however, so the reporter needed to indicate that "in the war" is an interpolation, not part of the original wording.