[General] "... said ... will ..." & "... said ... was ..." An inconsistency in style?

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cubezero3

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"... said ... will ..." & "... said ... was ..." An inconsistency in style?

The court’s decision will not just make it harder to bring big, ambitious employment class-action cases asserting discrimination based on sex, race or other factors, legal experts said.

...

In his opinion, Justice Scalia said it was unacceptable to allow employment discrimination lawsuits to proceed as huge class actions when monetary awards would be based on a broad formula per plaintiff, without having an individual assessment of how much each plaintiff had suffered.

...

Joseph Sellers, one of the top lawyers for the women in the Wal-Mart case, said that as a result of the ruling, there would be more class actions at the store or regional level, where it might not be hard to show that local managers had engaged in sex or age discrimination.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/business/21class.html

Hello, everyone.

Here are three paragraphs quoted from the same New York Times article.

It seems the writer, when indirectly quoting other people's words, followed two different routes. Sometimes, he chose to express the actual meanings and in other cases he shifted backwards the tenses in the original quotes.

It's very likely there are bits and pieces I haven't noticed and I have made a misjudgement.

If I am right in my analyse, I'd like to know whether it's important to keep to one route. It might be confusing.

Many thanks

Richard
 

Tdol

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Re: "... said ... will ..." & "... said ... was ..." An inconsistency in style?

I think the first one uses will to make the point more clearly to the reader about the impact of the decision, so the reporting phrase is tacked on the end and the tense left unchanged.
 
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