As mentioned in our previous tip, the standard practice in book and magazine publishing is to use square brackets, [ ], to indicate any interpolation by a reporter or editor into a direct quotation. Newspapers, however, have a long tradition of using parentheses, ( ), for this purpose. The reason, according to the AP Style Guide, is that square brackets "cannot be transmitted over news wires." As a result, the sentence that would appear in a book or magazine as

"The clapping, the appreciation . . . it's important for everybody who was [in a war]."

appears in a newspaper as

"The clapping, the appreciation . . . it's important for everybody who was (in a war)."

Since parentheses are often used for purposes other than to indicate an interpolation--whereas square brackets are not (except in a few narrowly defined instances that we'll look at later)--this leads to confusion. At PC World, we regularly use square brackets to supply further information about a story that a reader cites (but doesn't actually identify by name) in a Letter to the Editor:

"In your survey of search engines ["How to Stop Searching and Start Finding," September], I can't help but be a little upset . . ."

But again, the point of the brackets is to inform readers that the enclosed wording did not appear in the original language of the letter.