Brackets in grammar - what are they for?

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It's really maddening when I'm reading an article and I see a word or even a letter in brackets. I don't see any reason for them to be there and it just clutters up a smooth readying experience. Take this one for example; "Joanna Stern, Wall Street Journal personal technology columnist, who was impressed overall, told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" that exercise kills the Watch's battery life. "[D]ays when I went to a 45-minute spinning class, it was dying by 8 or 9 pm," she said."

What.the.actual.hell?

I mean, do people do it to sound or look pretentious? Do they do it because they're making something up or, "oh, well if you don't know what it means then you obviously didn't go to Princeton."

Brackets are used in journalism to indicate that [whatever is in brackets] was added by the journal's editor and wasn't written by the original source. If she forgot to write the D and only wrote "ays", the editor would add that D in brackets. Usually it's annoying and makes no difference but sometimes the editor adds something which he can't attribute to his source.

If that is indeed the case, seems kind of passive-aggressive to me - to keep the mistake on the page yet making it visible for all the world to see they reporter made a typo.

I know. Another pointless and annoying thing they do is when the source misspells a word, they will write that misspelled word and then add (sic.) which means the source misspelled that word and the editor acknowledges that without correcting the error.

eg. mispeled (sic.)

I thought sic was meant to indicate the quote was verbatim, that's actually what the person said without any embellishments or exaggeration. Before I learned that, I thought it was the opposite; not knowing the full and complete text 100% but kind of half remembering and inserting your own words to make it fit.

Have you tried accessing Wikipedia?[1] It has many excellent resources. For instance, in the context of this thread[2], there is an article on Alex Plank[3], which you might find interesting, if only for the fact that it clearly demonstrates the use of bracketed numbers when citing references.

References

[1] en.wikipedia.org
[2] viewtopic.php?t=279789
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Plank

Brackets are often used in news and media articles as well, so if they're quoting someone without including the entire context the quote will still make sense.

Square brackets are used to indicate additions, deletions, or changes to someone else's words when you are quoting what they said or wrote.

For example, if I say:

"Every other day I eat peanut butter cookies, figs, candy canes, and an assortment of tree bark because they are delicious."

And someone quotes my statement in this question using square brackets: "Is it true that '[e]very other day [you] eat peanut butter cookies [...] because [you think] they are delicious'?".......

"[e]" has square brackets because it's changed from an uppercase letter to lower case letter;

"[you]" has square brackets because it is a completely different word;

"[...]" indicates that there were a bunch of words here that have been removed;

"[you think]" is in square brackets because it's something added to my statement;