Read the sentence after the quote

Quick answer: Find the original, not the post about the original. Read at least two sentences before and after the quote, plus the question that prompted it. Then decide whether the meaning changed. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it gets worse.

Start with a fight everybody remembers

On August 15, 2017, at Trump Tower, the president took questions about Charlottesville. Two phrases from his answers have lived separate lives ever since.

One is "very fine people on both sides." It's real, and he said it. The other is a sentence from the same answer: he said he wasn't talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists, who he said should be condemned totally. That's real too. Pull the transcript and you'll find both.

Anyone who quotes only the first phrase and leaves out the second is doing something dishonest. Anyone who quotes only the second and pretends the first never happened is doing the same thing from the other side. Critics still argue about who he meant by "fine people" and whether the framing of "both sides" was fair. Those are legitimate arguments, and you can only have them if you've read the whole answer.

That's the method. Get the whole thing, then argue.

Find the original

Most quotes reach you third-hand. A screenshot of a tweet quoting an article quoting a speech. Each hand trims a little.

Go back to the source. For a speech or press conference, that means a full transcript or the complete video, usually on an official site, C-SPAN, or the outlet's own upload. For a written statement, it means the document. For an interview, it means the entire interview, not the pull-quote in the headline.

If you can't find the original after ten minutes, treat the quote as unconfirmed. That's not the same as false. It means you shouldn't repeat it yet.

A quote with no source at all is the easiest to dismiss. Famous names get tacked onto lines they never said. The line about insanity being the same thing over and over while expecting different results gets pinned on Einstein constantly. Researchers who've hunted for the source haven't found it in anything he wrote or said. The tell is a quote that's too tidy, from a person who lived a long time ago, with no date, book or speech attached.

Read both directions

Here's the routine. It takes about five minutes.

• Read the two or three sentences before the quote.
• Read the two or three sentences after it.
• Find the question the speaker was answering. A reporter's loaded setup changes what a reply means.
• Check what words like "it," "that" and "they" point back to.
• Notice whether the speaker is joking, quoting someone else, or arguing a hypothetical.

That fourth point matters more than people expect. In July 2012, in Roanoke, Virginia, President Obama said, "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." The Romney campaign turned the line into an ad.

The sentences just before it were about roads, bridges and the people who invested in them. Obama's defenders say "that" meant the infrastructure. His critics say the speech's whole drift was that business owners get too much credit and government too little. The grammar was loose enough to support both readings. So the ad did cut off context that matters. And the original didn't make the line as harmless as its defenders claimed.

Our opinion: the real argument was never about a pronoun. It's about whether success is mostly individual effort or mostly a shared inheritance, and that's an argument conservatives should want to have on the merits. You win it by quoting the whole passage and answering it.

When context makes it worse

Don't assume the full text always rescues the speaker. Sometimes it buries them.

At a New York fundraiser in September 2016, Hillary Clinton said you could put half of Trump's supporters into a "basket of deplorables." Defenders pointed out that she went on to describe the other group as people who felt let down by the economy and the government, people who deserved understanding. True. Read it all and she does say that.

It doesn't help much. She'd just sorted millions of her fellow citizens into a bucket on the basis of who they voted for. The next day she said she regretted saying "half." Context softened one part and confirmed the part people were angry about.

So don't ask, "Is there more to the story?" There's always more. Ask, "Does the more change the meaning?" Three answers are possible. It changes it a lot. It changes it a little. It changes nothing, and the clip was fair.

Watch the ellipsis

Three dots in a quote mean words were removed. Sometimes that's honest editing: cutting a "um," trimming a long aside. Sometimes it's surgery.

When you see an ellipsis, find the full sentence and read what sits inside the dots. Same with square brackets. A bracketed word is the writer's addition, and replacing "he" with "[the senator]" is usually harmless, while replacing a whole clause is not.

Also check the date. People change their minds, and old clips get passed around as if they were said yesterday. A twenty-year-old quote may be exactly right as a record of what someone once believed and still wrong as a guide to what they think now. Say which one you're doing.

A habit that costs you ten seconds

Before you share a quote, run the check on yourself. If you can't say where it came from and what was said right after it, you're not ready to post it.

And if it makes you furious, slow down further. Anger is the reaction a clipped quote is built to produce. The best-written ones feel like proof of everything you already suspected. That's the moment to open the transcript.

The same discipline applies to what your side tells you. It's easy to catch the other team's trims. It takes more character to catch your own. Reporters and outlets that care about the truth will fix mistakes in public; we've written about how to tell which outlets actually own their mistakes. Editors have their own checklist too, which we cover in the four questions an editor asks before a story runs.

If the quote came from an unnamed person rather than a recorded one, a different set of rules applies. Start with when an anonymous source is worth believing.

Teach it at home, too. Kids can learn this faster than most adults. Next time one of them shows you something outrageous somebody supposedly said, ask one question. "What's the next sentence?"

Then go read it together.