Yes, you do in fact alter quotes

Here's a confession you won't hear many writers/reporters make: We alter quotes all the time. All the time. And any writer/reporter who denies that is either a liar or has a terrible memory.

Don't get me wrong. I've never knowingly misrepresented anything anyone said at any time, and I never will. (I've also never been accused of doing so.) I've never convoluted a source's words to mean something he didn't, never cast a quote as leaning toward the opposite pole of what the speaker originally said. But I've spoken with captains of industry, academic minds of towering stature, political and civic leaders, public figures accustomed to speaking to reporters, and sources of every other stripe, and I've probably altered quotes from every one of them. I've taken out "er" and "um" and "uh, uh, uh, you know, uh" and every other kind of verbal hitch. I've corrected subject-verb agreements, run-on sentences, unclear antecedents, slang, everything. And I've done this for people from every walk of life, of every intelligence and academic level.

Everybody makes mistakes while speaking. Everybody. Everybody. Unless it's truly pertinent to the situation (you're writing a scathing column about how the local teacher's union president doesn't speak proper English, for example), you clean up those missteps. I used to cover high school sports. Why should I directly quote a 16-year-old football player's hyperanimated remarks made in the glow of a state championship win, and embarrass him and his family? And believe me, I've heard plenty of cringe-inducing statements in that kind of environment. I've also heard off-the-cuff remarks that could have ended more than one career if they had been published, and that I was not told to keep off the record, that I just let slide by my typing fingers. If I'd been writing absolutely verbatim quotes, I'd have included them.

So there's no need for Mobile Press-Register reporter Robert McClendon to write that one of the witnesses to the mass killings in my hometown said, "He wasn't in no hurry." I've seen other direct quotes from Samson residents that had similar grammar. I don't doubt that those are direct quotes. I just think that, considering how a witness to mass murder is telling how he somehow escaped being another victim to that murder, maybe you cut the guy a little slack. Maybe change "no" to "any," just because he'd literally stared down the barrel of a gun, and he'd seen his daughter rush to pick up a four-month-old covered in her mother's and sister's blood, a four-month-old who'd also been shot, and it's just possible that's the kind of thing you don't get over by drinking a cold Coke and resting on the couch for a few minutes. Maybe.

Of all the sad news coming out of Samson, I think what chilled me the most was the quote from Geneva County Sheriff's Deputy Josh Myers, who had been involved in the effort to stop the maniac and only found out later that his wife and 18-month-old daughter were killed, and his four-month-old injured. Myers said, "I feel like I should be able to walk in the house and my wife would be there, my baby girl climbing on me." The night I first read that comment, I went around hugging everybody in my family who wasn't already in bed, and that includes my three dogs.

On a lighter note, my mother took Jacob out for a stroll yesterday. Just like his daddy, he never goes perambulating without his shades.