> I have been told that this bracketing fetish may come from academia, where formal rules of writing are a kind of hazing and where sounding faintly like a space alien could be mistaken for rigor. The academics are also wrong to do it. Presumably they believe it’s OK to vivisect quotations because the reader can always go to their footnotes and look up the original text to see what it actually says.
I disagree. The brackets are especially helpful if you quote partially and leave out parts of a paragraph and denote it with: [...]
I'm a former lawyer, and brackets are critical in legal writing. If you are quoting a court case or a brief, you need to be crystal clear about which precise words existed in the source and which ones you added in to make verbs/nouns match up.
This is probably also somewhat important in other parts of academia, where precise use of words is important. But it is critical in the legal field.
I disagree. The brackets are especially helpful if you quote partially and leave out parts of a paragraph and denote it with: [...]