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Stop defacing quotes with brackets

slate.com

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Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#51

Post by Dylan16807 »

jusssi wrote: post #41
Dylan16807 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Etiquette is circular logic. A larger quote would still be arbitrarily cut out of a larger context. If you're extending past the good part purely to get a subject I'd even say it ends up more arbitrary. Unless you're taking a test, you don't need to prove you understood it, and if your reader lacks confidence in your understanding then paraphrasing makes the problem worse! Instead of merely worrying you missed import…

> Etiquette is circular logic. I was tempted to reply to this by throwing etiquette out of window, but that would get me downvoted to hell. Because there is an etiquette. > Paraphrasing can mangle words so easily. I'm baffled why you would imply otherwise. When I paraphrase someone, they're my words. Not the original author's. I take responsibility for them. > And your edit just makes you look stupid. You're right do…

> I was tempted to reply to this by throwing etiquette out of window, but that would get me downvoted to hell. Because there is an etiquette.

There is. But "It's bad because it's bad etiquette", with no further elaboration or citation, is a pretty useless claim.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#52

Post by wiml »

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…

No, I think you're absolutely right, and the author of the Slate piece is a nitwit.

Of course it's better to find a quote that can stand alone, but if you can't do that — say, because there's a pronoun that refers to something too far away from the phrase of interest to include — then use brackets, ellipses, and so on.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#53

Post by loeg »

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…

That's the correct use of the pattern and the only way I've seen it used.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#54

Post by loeg »

wiml wrote: post #52
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…

No, I think you're absolutely right, and the author of the Slate piece is a nitwit. Of course it's better to find a quote that can stand alone, but if you can't do that — say, because there's a pronoun that refers to something too far away from the phrase of interest to include — then use brackets, ellipses, and so on.

They're both right. The Slate article is just picking on an uncommon, mistaken use of the pattern. I agree that it's pointless whining — I don't know that I've ever seen this mistake made.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#55

Post by function_seven »

wiml wrote: post #52
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…

No, I think you're absolutely right, and the author of the Slate piece is a nitwit. Of course it's better to find a quote that can stand alone, but if you can't do that — say, because there's a pronoun that refers to something too far away from the phrase of interest to include — then use brackets, ellipses, and so on.

The author's point here is different than that, though. The original writer had no need to substitute the pronoun in the short quote. It was replaced with just another pronoun, so no extra information was inserted. It would have been just as clear if left in its original phrasing.

From TFA:

> Sometimes you have to use brackets anyway. Maybe the speaker or writer was using an acronym or a completely unfamiliar piece of jargon that the reader needs explained. Maybe they were referring to a person by their last name or nickname, when the reader has not yet been introduced to the person’s full name. But these changes should be both necessary and obvious.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#56

Post by jusssi »

ddingus wrote: post #44
jusssi wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Etiquette is circular logic. I was tempted to reply to this by throwing etiquette out of window, but that would get me downvoted to hell. Because there is an etiquette. > Paraphrasing can mangle words so easily. I'm baffled why you would imply otherwise. When I paraphrase someone, they're my words. Not the original author's. I take responsibility for them. > And your edit just makes you look stupid. You're right do…

So are the words in brackets, and so should be responsibility.

But a quote intermingled with [paraphrase] just becomes a more awkward way to paraphrase? Because surely it isn't a verbatim quote any more.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#57

Post by Lucasoato »

gbh444g wrote: post #48
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…

Is it a regexp? I'm thinking if we could come up with a especially dense writing style that needs quadratic time to fully understand a sentence. Like you read a sentence of N words and get only a surface level meaning. Then you re-read it and understand a bit more. Repeat it about N times and you get the full picture.

I'll spend the night trying to improve it at least to O(n * log(n))

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#58

Post by chrismorgan »

tpoacher wrote: post #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."

That second part completely ruins the pithiness of the saying. It’s much better as just “I hate people who generalise.” Or, if you really feel the need to be explicit about the humour, “I hate people who generalise. All of them.”

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#59

Post by marton78 »

This reminds me of how much I hate people saying "quote unquote" followed by what they're quoting. If you really insist on unquoting, please do it where it belongs. However, if you trust me in determining where your quote ends, please spare me the noise.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#60

Post by Dylan16807 »

kqr wrote: post #19
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.

I could see that in some extraordinarily niche scenarios but if someone has the bandwidth to be transmitting full news articles then they have the bandwidth to use a whole 7 bits per character. And they should be compressing it too, at which point you don't need to restrict less common characters.
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