why do journalists and authors often put brackets around words in seemingly strange parts of sentences?

Question

For example, a sentence I just read went as follows:

> “‘I don’t think [the book] had anything to do with his arrest and neither does Anne Marie Schubert,’ he says.”—(Excerpt from the appendix of ‘I’ll Be Gone in the Dark’ by Michelle McNamara)

Found in Other.

Answer 1

You will also see ‘[sic]’ added to quotations similar to, “[I am honered [sic] to serve you, the great American People, as your 45th President of the United States!](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-fallow-misspellings-trump-20170220-story.html)”

‘Sic’ is Latin for ‘thus’ or ‘so’ and indicates that the error or grammatical oddity in the source material was included verbatim with the full knowledge of the author or editor, rather than having been accidentally introduced in the process of writing the article.