A. He told me that he was involved in a company that was doing investments in China, and the returns, when they told me the returns, I said, There’s no way; there’s no possible way. And he came over to my house, showed me a brochure that I still can remember to this day as just, where I just, I kind of laughed at it, you know, and I just go, you know, this is just, you know — from the Dun & Bradstreet report there was just things that didn’t, you know — I just go, you know, Darryl — I just wasn’t comfortable with it.

According to the Gregg Reference Manual of Style, “Quotation marks are not needed to set off interior thoughts or imagined dialogue.” In such a broken speech pattern, and with the witness changing tenses in mid stream, it reads more like a stream of consciousness novel to me than anything that’s close to a verbatim quotation. So if that is the pattern of speech, and particularly if the witness is changing tenses, I often will leave out the quotation marks.

Here’s a different example from a recent depo:

MR. S.: So we took it upon ourselves, in an exercise of due diligence, to contact the original photographers and say, Gee, could we make copies? Could you produce copies of the photographs from your negatives? Which is what we did.

There’s no way this senior partner in a large law firm (the speaker) called up the photographer and said those specific words, using that language. It’s more the concept that he’s relating, and that’s why it seems more appropriate to me to leave out the quotation marks. (You’ll also notice the punctuation is not “correct,” as I have set off the last clause as though it were a complete sentence. The speaker skipped a beat before delivering that line, so I followed his lead and set it off for emphasis.)

It’s not that I’m afraid of being sued; I really can’t imagine that happening. And I don’t know that it’s because we’re “lazy” that some of us debate this point. It takes a lot more thought and effort to consider each piece of dialogue within a transcript and decide on the appropriate resolution, punctuation-wise.

Which comes back to my point of asking Deb her opinion. When it comes down to it, it’s readability and common sense that matter, so I was interested in what a non-legal mind thought.

Q. Did she say something?
A. I heard her say, ‘That’s my favorite color.”

that’s the way I would put it in my transcript. Meaning I would put it in quotes. However, this is hashed out in our court reporting meetings ad infinitum. Some say what I say, and some say, as your commenter says, that it should look like this:

Q. Did she say something?
A. I heard her say, That’s my favorite color.

This, however, fits in absolutely NO rule of grammar except some perceived court reporter’s grammar where the court reporter is afraid (IMHO) that someone is going to sue her or him for quoting someone when it’s not an ACTUAL verbatim quote, or what I say following the next sentence — just plain laziness. It’s silly, in my opinion, but in the court reporting world I think I’m in the relative minority in that belief. (minority being, I’m guessing, something like 40/60% at meetings) In brutal honesty, what I think it is for court reporters? They don’t want the hard job of putting all those extra quotation marks in. Heh.

Because, talk about ambiguous, it is awful if you don’t use quotation marks. Here’s an example:

Q. Were you talking to him?
A. Yes.
Q. What did he say?
A. That’s my favorite color.

I mean, REALLY. How ambiguous is that??? Is the person not answering the question, but making a non sequitur? Or is he answering the question that the person said, “That’s my favorite color”?

The real experts in our trade journals agree with me, and say that’s preferable, but they also say the other way is acceptable, I think largely based on the outcry from all these reporters with the other opinion.

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