Question

What do brackets around the first letter of a sentence mean? Sometimes I will see a sentence like this: [T]he dog was said to have been... What do the brackets indicate?

Answer 1

Typically this indicates that the passage was part of a quoted text in which the initial letter was not at the beginning of the sentence.

Explanation:

Example:

Suppose the original sentence began:
`color(white)("XXX")"Susy had heard that "underline("the dog was said to have been...")`

If we wanted to quote only the underlined portion:
`color(white)("XXX")underline("the dog was said to have been...")`
but to use it at the beginning of a sentence

We are faced with the problem of using a lower case `"t"` as in the original or using an upper case `"T"` as one would expect at the beginning of a sentence.

`"[T]"` indicates that the original form of the letter has been replaced to provide valid sentence structure.