The case of Brackets v. Parentheses

It was brought to my attention that in my last post I was wrong about the use of brackets, so let's have a little lesson, shall we?


Here's the paragraph in question:


"The drums went by my house. I didn't know about (the protest) until then, so we jumped up, hung up on the phone with my aunt, and jumped in,” said Elise Taft.


My argument (and one I considered to be relatively nitpicky) was that the use of parentheses was incorrect in this case, as brackets are usually used when you're changing a quote like this.



Here's the deal: I'm a Chicago Manual of Style girl. It's just my thing. It may be because everyone follows these conventions, including Oxford, the AMA, and the APA. But if everyone jumped off a cliff, would I do it too? Probably, if that everyone included my Chicago Manual of Style.


Anyway, here's the problem with what I said. I used the word "journalism" to refer to this abomination of a news article. And when you say "journalism," you throw all normal grammar conventions to the wind and pull out your AP Stylebook. 


The Associated Press has its own nifty little quirks to differentiate it from the rest of the grammar world. To be fair, most of these quirks have to do with writing news stories quickly and keeping them as short as possible. However, I think this is bullshit.


But my opinion aside, according to my nifty AP Stylebook, brackets "cannot be transmitted over news wires. Use parentheses or recast the material." 


Did you guys know this? It is so like the AP to ignore the existence of brackets when the rest of the world uses them. This tells me a couple of things:


1. I grew up entirely on digitized news.
2. Nobody reads the newspaper anymore except your grandparents.
3. I hate the AP.


So the problem is that in traditional journalism, we must listen to the AP Stylebook and use parentheses, which means that I can't make fun of his non-use of brackets. I have to be fair. He's a journalist. He just doesn't know they exist. 


In the online world, brackets are the accepted convention here. Since technically this is journalism (I guess), I would have to agree that parentheses are correct. But seriously, can we call this journalism? You wouldn't call a fifth grader's current events website journalism, would you? I don't see a difference.


And also, the AP would kill him for using a serial comma in that exact same sentence.