Expert: Leslie - 8/31/2007

Question
Square brackets are used to enclose explanatory or missing […] material. Let us consider a sentence:" Vladimir Putin, President, Russia said that life is good." We need to quote it but in the original sentence the word "President" is missing. So we enclose "President" with square brackets. Shall we retain comma  after "President"?

In other words which punctuation is right:

" Vladimir Putin, [President,] Russia said that life is good." (with comma)

" Vladimir Putin, [President] Russia said that life is good." (witout comma)

Answer
Sabirjan,

The commas are not needed when brackets are used.

The Gregg Manual says brackets ([ ]) are used for a correction or insertion in a quoted extract.

In the sentence you gave me, no commas, parentheses, or brackets are needed unless you are inserting information into a quote. You could say, "President Vladimir Putin..."

I hope my information answered your question.

Leslie