Another bracket question. A quote I'm using for an essay says, Nothing happened except the granules immediately dissolvedWould this be correct: Nothing happened except the [sugar] immediately dissolvedor Nothing happened except [the sugar] immediately dissolved Basically I'm just asking whether the the goes inside the brackets or not.Or are neither of those correct?
the one [the sugar] is correct (:
Brackets indicate the insertion of words not originally present in the original quote to aid in clarification/specificity. So, assuming you hadn't already clarified that you were talking about a sugar experiment It would actually be more along the lines of: Nothing happened except the [sugar] granules immediately dissolved If you did already establish that you were writing about a sugar experiment prior to integrating the quote, no brackets would be needed.
