Not every utterance is worth recording ... and you can quote me on that

The reporters huddle tightly around the locker of the day’s star. They have faithfully recorded the facts of the game, but as deadline looms, they seek color from a key participant.

“Hey, slugger, can you give us a quote?”

The question comes from beneath a fedora, out of lips clasping a cigarette. And the scene is depicted in grainy, black-and-white, out of an imagination that doesn’t grasp the way the media work.

Or at least, not the way they work properly.

Maybe newspaper men (and they were almost all men back then) did that kind of thing before the advent of television news. But I’ve been around a few locker rooms and postgame news conferences, and never once have I heard a reporter ask for a quote instead of asking a question.

I’ll bet a lot of readers think we do that that all the time. And I’ll bet something else: Even a lot of reporters who would never ask something so stereotypical and stupid in an interview give in to this “mister, can you spare a quote” thinking when they sit down at their keyboards. Quotes marks, some seem to think, are like pink flamingos or mistletoe — ornamental in nature. To some, a news story just isn’t a news story unless festooned with a direct quote or two.

If a reporter is doing his job (or at least his interviews) well, quotes will indeed be integral to his or her writing, but they’re not mere decorations. Bland, redundant or gratuitous quotes do considerable violence to otherwise readable articles. I often try to explain to young reporters: You are a professional writer, and seldom will you interview a professional talker; so although sources convey valuable information, most of the time, you can explain things to readers better than they can. Quotes are used to express a novel thought in a way that cannot be improved upon, to convey a sense of personality or emotion on the part of the speaker or to allow parsing of the language when the precise verbiage of an utterance is integral to the story itself.

A look at the sins:

The bland: Lord knows sports copy is full of ’em. The movie “Bull Durham” features a scene in which long-in-the-tooth catcher Crash Davis tutors wet-behind-the-ears pitcher Nuke LaLoosh on how to deal with the media — or more precisely, how to punctuate sentences with inanities such as, “good Lord willing” and “one game at a time.” This time, the movie-makers hit their mark. Political sources often spew equivalent banalities. Bland quotes can, of course, come from bland people, but I find they flow more frequently from the risk- and confrontation-averse. They are by design rhetoric’s empty calories, meant to fill space without adding meaning or attracting unwanted attention.

Yet, writers sometimes draw attention to unremarkable remarks, anyway.

Well-conceived interview questions are the only remedy ... and sometimes even they don’t work.

The redundant: This is not a problem with the quote per se, but with its presentation. Young writers, in particular, often are not comfortable straying far from their perceived role of stenographer, so stories are constructed like an Add-a-Bead necklace, each quote preceded by a transition graf that paraphrases it entirely.

I stumbled upon a pile of my old clips and ruefully discovered my own juvenilia suffers this transition-quote-transition-quote-transition-quote pattern.

The antidote is to remember that a quote should finish, not repeat, the thought presented in the preceding paragraph.

The gratuitous: A subtle, psychological urge often emerges when you interview a source — the reporter feels compelled to acknowledge the conversation by including a quote, even if the material provided by the source is not particularly compelling. I’ve been guilty of this one a few times, too, particularly in sports stories after interviewing high school kids. You just know they are going to open the newspaper the next morning and expect to see themselves in print, and you would hurt their feelings if you left them out of your story.

So instead, you waste a little of the reader’s time indulging the kid’s feelings ... and, frankly, your own.

The only fixes are better interview questions and a spine. A journalist owes that to readers.

Let us not forget the virtues of strong quotes:

Sometimes, our sources DO say things better than we can write them: Only a dunce would paraphrase the succinct wit that says, “A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” (By the way, that belongs to Winston Churchill.)

Sometimes, a quote can convey emotion or personality: Bluffton High School wrestling coach John Hollman conveyed both when, in his former job as Hilton Head Island High School’s head man, he declared, “If I wouldn’t get a ticket for littering, I'd throw the trophy out the window into the Broad River on the way home,” after his team settled for third place in a Beaufort High School wrestling tournament.

By the way, more great quotes followed because Hollman drew a one-match suspension for that remark.

Sometimes, it is known ahead of time a speaker’s language is going to be parsed so finely, it’s best the writer not intervene: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” I’m sure most of you will recognize this line from the language’s Parser in Chief. This kind of stuff brings out the lawyer in all of us, and sometimes it’s easy to tell when direct quotes are the best form of evidence.

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