Sometimes when people are quoted, certain (sometimes very important) words are included in parentheses. Why is this?
In many cases, it’s because those words are replacing a pronoun in the quoted sentence with the noun that the replaced pronoun is referrring to. For example, if the source of the quote said, “Bob and Jim got here last night to pick up the sofa. They had dinner at a local diner before they went to the hotel. They packed it up in their pickup and left at 4:30 this morning.” and you wanted to quote only the last sentence, you’d quote it as “[Bob and Jim] packed [the sofa] up in their pickup and left at 4:30 this morning.” Another common reason, when quoting from a written source, is to correct misspellings in the original quote. If quoting the sentence “Certen quotations have mispellings in the orignial source.” people may quote it as “[Certain] quotations have [misspellings] in the [original] source.” rather than as “Certen [sic] quotations have mispellings [sic] in the orignial [sic] source.” to improve clarity or preserve the writing flow.
