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Stop defacing quotes with brackets

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31–40 of 206 posts

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#31

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

I am curious too. After some research I assume the relevant standard is IPTC 7901, but I don't see a mention of excluded characters in the body of the newswire:

https://iptc.org/standards/iptc-7901/

Perhaps the convention of a limited character set dates back to the telegraph era

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#32

This does remind me that I really dislike when authors insert "sic" inside quotes.

I saw one the other day on a news article where they'd put something like "They took him to hospital [sic]." The journalist hadn't realised that "to hospital" is correct English.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#33
post #3

Hard disagree, the shift in perspective from third-person to the first-person quote is jarring. You use the brackets to mold the quote into the grammatical context of the sentence that surrounds. Extra emphasis on the context of the grammar , as changing the overall context alters its message. You can also use those brackets to cut out unnecessary/irrelevant/extraneous words. A necessity, sometimes, and one that is e…

I'm sorry, but you are simply wrong. Quotes are, well, quotes , and if their grammar absolutely needs to be edited to fit your prose, then that means you shouldn't be using that quote. Editing a quote should be done with grave solemnity -- you are changing someone else's words -- and only to clarify meaning that was disturbed when you extracted the quote from its natural context. Anything else can be handled in your…

IMO using ellipsis [...] or modifying quotes in order to present them in a new context is totally okay, as long as you don't alter the original intended meaning fundamentally by doing so.

After all quoting someone at all is already an act of tearing their words out of the context they have been put in by that author.

You can misquote someone badly without brackets, while you can quote someone faithfully with brackets.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#34
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how else are you supposed to denote that something is in the original text and not a transcription mistake?

The problem is that "sic" has two uses. The standard use is, as you say, to indicate that the text is as it appeared originally, and you didn't add a typo. The common Internet use is to indicate "This is wrong. Har har you're stupid." Many people don't realize the first usage exists.

Interesting, I never realized that there was this second usage out there. I have always seen "sic" after an obvious grammatic or spelling mistake.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#35
post #26
post #3

Hard disagree, the shift in perspective from third-person to the first-person quote is jarring. You use the brackets to mold the quote into the grammatical context of the sentence that surrounds. Extra emphasis on the context of the grammar , as changing the overall context alters its message. You can also use those brackets to cut out unnecessary/irrelevant/extraneous words. A necessity, sometimes, and one that is e…

> Hey now, [he is] one of these people, and [he] most definitely exists! Who? How do you know?

You broke the meaning of that sentence on purpose, you don't get to blame it on the brackets.

Look at it done correctly: tomc1985 objects that "[he is] one of these people, and [he] most definitely exists!"

You may not like how it looks, but it completely solves the fake issue you were making fun of.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#36
post #32

This does remind me that I really dislike when authors insert "sic" inside quotes.

I saw one the other day on a news article where they'd put something like "They took him to hospital [sic]." The journalist hadn't realised that "to hospital" is correct English.

"took him to hospital" sounds very weird. Are you sure that's standard in american english?

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#37
> "People who correct other people’s language are invariably rude, are almost always transparently insecure, and are very, very often wrong."

Reminded me if this funny quote: "I hate people who generalise; like, all white middle-class heterosexual men, for example."

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#39
post #28

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

Because they use(d) a reduced character set that included parentheses but not brackets. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code#ITA_2_and_US-TTY There was a time before ASCII, you know...

But this only punts the question forward: why do they still use this reduced character set, when most (if not all) of their data is transmitted over the internet?

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#40
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw one the other day on a news article where they'd put something like "They took him to hospital [sic]." The journalist hadn't realised that "to hospital" is correct English.

"took him to hospital" sounds very weird. Are you sure that's standard in american english?

Well now I'm learning something here. I see that it's not standard English in the USA. I'm in a commonwealth country where that's the standard way to say it[1], and both the source of the quote and the article were local. But now I wonder if the journalist writing it might have been originally from the USA.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Which-is-grammatically-correct-he-was-...

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