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Stop defacing quotes with brackets

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Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#11

Post by phnofive »

jusssi wrote: post #7
kqr wrote: post #2

This does not address the primary way I (ab?)use these brackets: to fill in the subject explicitly when the original author refers to it only implicitly. So quoting the last clause in the above paragraph, I might write > when the author refers to [the subject] only implicitly. The obvious alternative is to quote a longer passage. Maybe this is one of those cases where conciseness fights with authenticity. Another sol…

Normally one should paraphrase. Quotes are reserved for special cases where that exact way something is said is essential for communicating the message. And the need to add []-blocks is evidence that it doesn't belong to that special class. Edit: All you lazy copy-paste writers downvoting all the comments here that propose paraphrasing instead of quoting: I see you.

Why?

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#13

Post by [deleted] »

phnofive wrote: post #11
jusssi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normally one should paraphrase. Quotes are reserved for special cases where that exact way something is said is essential for communicating the message. And the need to add []-blocks is evidence that it doesn't belong to that special class. Edit: All you lazy copy-paste writers downvoting all the comments here that propose paraphrasing instead of quoting: I see you.

Why?

[deleted]

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#16

Post by torstenvl »

Pretty ironic to ascribe purely speculative emotions ("afraid") in the same breath as lambasting others for imprecision in ascribing words.

Brackets are necessary to clarify context in a concise way. I doubt I'd use them in the contexts the OP means, but they are invaluable in legal writing.

----

"[Brackets for editorial insertions] are invaluable in legal writing." -torstenvl

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#18

Post by gnicholas »

leipert wrote: post #6

> I have been told that this bracketing fetish may come from academia, where formal rules of writing are a kind of hazing and where sounding faintly like a space alien could be mistaken for rigor. The academics are also wrong to do it. Presumably they believe it’s OK to vivisect quotations because the reader can always go to their footnotes and look up the original text to see what it actually says. I disagree. The b…

I'm a former lawyer, and brackets are critical in legal writing. If you are quoting a court case or a brief, you need to be crystal clear about which precise words existed in the source and which ones you added in to make verbs/nouns match up.

This is probably also somewhat important in other parts of academia, where precise use of words is important. But it is critical in the legal field.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#19

Post by kqr »

karlerss wrote: post #12

Why can't "[the bracekts] “[...] be transmitted over news wires.”"?

I can't give a concrete reason, but I suspect they might want to be able to transmit over channels with comparatively little bandwidth/much noise. Shannon taught us that more reliable communication in the face of low bandwidth and/or high noise is only possible with a smaller symbol set.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#20

Post by jusssi »

phnofive wrote: post #11
jusssi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normally one should paraphrase. Quotes are reserved for special cases where that exact way something is said is essential for communicating the message. And the need to add []-blocks is evidence that it doesn't belong to that special class. Edit: All you lazy copy-paste writers downvoting all the comments here that propose paraphrasing instead of quoting: I see you.

Why?

Several reasons. Etiquette. Less reason mangle the words of others (arbitrarily cutting something out of larger context can also easily mangle). Let's your reader see how you understood the communication, not just that you found it somewhere and copy-pasted it in.
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