The Use of Square Brackets ([ ]) in Academic Writing

When you are writing and you want to add a little extra information in the middle of a sentence, you might put that information in parentheses.

But what happens if you are quoting someone else? In that case, if you put the information in parentheses, it might look like these are the words of the person you are quoting.

This is where brackets come in.

They are commonly used in academic writing and sometimes in journalism.

We’ll cover all the ways brackets are used below so that you’ll know what they mean when you encounter them and you can use them with confidence yourself!
 

When do you use square brackets?

In academic writing, you use square brackets to indicate words are added or explained in some way in quoted text, to modify a quote for grammatical reasons, to show missing words with ellipses or to replace expletives.

Using square brackets to add words to quoted text

Sometimes, you need to use a quote that will not be clear if you do not add words to it to better explain it.

This often happens if you are just pulling out a sentence or a small section of a passage.

The sentence or section makes sense within its full context, but when you pull the shorter quote out, it may be necessary to add explanatory words.

For example, the full passage might be, “I saw the book two or three times. They have it in the evidence room.”

However, for the purposes of your paper, you only want to use the second sentence.

The reader won’t know what is meant by “it” if you just pull out that second sentence. Therefore, you’d add “the book” in brackets:

This could also be the case if the speaker quoted was not entirely clear in what they said. Bracketed words could help.

This is the case below, where the reader might not realize the the quote is referring to a specific group of children without that information in the brackets:

You will see brackets used in this way in both academic writing and journalism.

Using square brackets to explain something in quoted text

Sometimes, there is something in the quoted text that could be misleading, and when that happens, you can use brackets to explain.

There are essentially two situations where this is the case.

Using “sic” in brackets

In academic writing, it is usually considered unethical to change someone’s words when you are quoting them even if what they have said is grammatically incorrect or they have used the wrong word.

This is also the case if they have written something and misspelled a word.

This is generally the standard in journalism as well.

However, when this happens, you do not want to simply misspell the word or reproduce the grammatical error without making it clear that the error is not yours. This also keeps any editors from “fixing” the error.

The word “sic” is a Latin word that means you are reproducing something exactly as said or written despite the error, and it goes in brackets:

The man stated that he “hadn’t never been nowhere [sic] near there.”

In this example, the speaker misspoke and used the word “prospective” when they meant “perspective”:

And in the excerpt below, the person has mixed up the spelling of “your” and “you’re” in writing:

Using brackets to explain your emphasis

Sometimes when you are using a quote, you want to emphasize a word or a part of the quote by putting it in bold or italics.

However, the emphasis is yours and not that of the person you are quoting.

You can make this clear by putting the phrase “italics mine” or “emphasis mine” in brackets at the end of the quote. If you do not want to draw attention to yourself, you might use “added” instead of “mine”:

Modifying a quote to make a sentence grammatically correct

While you generally should not modify a quote to fix the grammar, sometimes you might need to make a tweak so that it fits grammatically into your own sentence.

Bracketed words are a signal to the reader that you are replacing words with your own.

This should only be done if it is obvious what has been replaced.

For example, you might have a quote from someone that you want to use in which the person says “I enjoy cooking.”

However, you want to use this in your own sentence, so you might write it like this:

The brackets around the [s] indicate that you altered this slightly so that it would fit in the sentence with “he said.”

Using square brackets with an ellipses to show missing words in a quote

Ellipses are three dots used to show either a pause in someone’s speech or that words are missing in a sentence.

For example, a sentence might say this:

From the highways and byways to the smallest towns and largest cities, from north to south and coast to coast, everyone in the country had heard of him.

This could be truncated in a quote to get the same point across like this:

“From . . . north to south and coast to coast, everyone in the country had heard of him.”

However, this could be confusing if you have a sentence with ellipses to indicate a pause and ellipses to indicate missing words.

AP and APA styles do not have specific instructions for this situation, but MLA style and Chicago do.

Your original passage might be someone saying, “I think . . . I think I saw the blue one first, after you spoke to me, followed by the red one.”

The ellipses here indicate that the person paused between the first and second “I think.”

You may have decided “after you spoke to me” is unimportant since the person is directly addressing you. But you already have ellipses in this sentence.

Chicago style says that you should place the ellipses in brackets and say “brackets added” after the quote to indicate that the brackets are not part of the original material:

For MLA style, you can just use the brackets for the portion that is removed:
“I think . . . I think I saw the blue one first [ . . . ] followed by the red one.”

You might also be writing for an organization or publication that has its own house style which specifies how to handle this.

Note that APA and MLA are both academic styles.

AP style is used in journalism while Chicago style tends to be the standard in publishing.

Replacing an expletive

Occasionally, you might be quoting a person who is swearing, and you are worried that this will offend your audience.

In this situation, you can replace the swear word with [expletive] in brackets: