Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stop defacing quotes with brackets

slate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 206 posts

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#81

Post by blackbrokkoli »

While I was reading this rant about erroneous brackets, I was consistently thrown off by the authors wrong styling of links.

That is not even snark, the bold read, weirdly placed lines under links kept pulling my eyes in. Apparently, the author removed the (old-fashioned, but agreed upon) typographical underline for links and replaced it by border-bottom, which starts below the descender of the letters instead of the baseline. That way, they look...misaligned.

Meanwhile, I never considered the brackets in quotes confusing and found them quite helpful at times, especially when reading particularly old English which is weird enough even if correct.

Not sure what the lesson is here, but definitively entertaining.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#82

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I have always assumed that this was a journalistic (not academic) practice, indicating where what is shown, deviates from the original.

I’d assume that kind of thing is important in journalism.

But it is ugly. I just think that changing the text without indicating a change, or adding a bunch of text to establish context, is uglier.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#83

Post by codetrotter »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #82

I have always assumed that this was a journalistic (not academic) practice, indicating where what is shown, deviates from the original. I’d assume that kind of thing is important in journalism. But it is ugly. I just think that changing the text without indicating a change, or adding a bunch of text to establish context, is uglier.

The OP is speaking specifically about inside of quote marks though. And I agree with op. Don’t go change me to [him] etc when me is already part of a sentence inside of quotation marks.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#84

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

codetrotter wrote: post #83
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #82

I have always assumed that this was a journalistic (not academic) practice, indicating where what is shown, deviates from the original. I’d assume that kind of thing is important in journalism. But it is ugly. I just think that changing the text without indicating a change, or adding a bunch of text to establish context, is uglier.

The OP is speaking specifically about inside of quote marks though. And I agree with op. Don’t go change me to [him] etc when me is already part of a sentence inside of quotation marks.

I agree with the OP, but journalists have a different priority from other writers of prose. Information accuracy is of paramount importance, with deviance from the original being important to highlight. The other thing they do, is use an ellipsis (…) to indicate excised text.

Another issue is that they are obliged to help their audience understand a topic, so paraphrasing, contextualizing, and clarifying are important.

Personally, I think that a quote should, indeed, be posted “whole,” but, if that is not done, then brackets (or something like it) should be used.

If it is posted “whole,” then it generally needs to have context established for the quote.

I prefer “whole,” myself, with context, but I am also rather...prolix. Journalists tend to put a premium on being concise. They usually have a word limit on articles.

It’s certainly not something I’m losing any sleep over. My mother was a scientific editor, and her bugaboo was dangling participles. That kind of thing can cause problems in scientific writing, but, in some cases, might make prose easier to read. I tend to "bend" the rules of "proper English," myself. It can be fun, watching pedant heads explode.

There was another link someone around here posted, where the author was complaining about how major news organizations were not posting their corrections in a visible manner.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#85

Post by thedufer »

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…

I think this is addressed in the following section:

> 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.

Not quite explicitly, but it isn't a far leap from "referring to a person by their last name or nickname" to pronouns.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#86

Post by kqr »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #60
kqr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The set of people at the wire transmitting full articles might be different from the set publishing brief facts from low-bandwidth locations. (But it is convenient if they use the same infrastructure for it!)

I'm not convinced they would be compressing it. When you have the bandwidth for a full article, size is probably not going to be the problem, and when you don't have the bandwidth, compression is probably counterproductive.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#87

Post by sneak »

I think worse than this defacement is when someone alters a quote to redact (usually using punctuation) or intentionally misspell "bad" words.

Brackets clarify a quote by providing necessary context, and are clearly marked as an alteration. Editing a word to a different word, or intentionally misspelling a word when the quote was not misspelled is actively dishonest.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#88

Post by BlueTemplar »

loeg wrote: post #54
wiml wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, the author clearly has, but since I haven't either, this article probably has no place on HN (which seems to have quite a different audience)...

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#89

Post by BlueTemplar »

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.

How do journalists using a non-latin-based alphabet do it ?

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#90

Post by ghusbands »

ddingus wrote: post #62

The usage the author points out is odd, and one I would never use. However, it is not brackets alone that is an issue. The usage is strange! Begin excerpt: They may groan when Corky, denied the massive funding he’s asked for, tells the town council he’s going to “go home and bite [his] pillow,” the way I do now. End excerpt. The quote with brackets in it appears functionally equivalent to: "go home and bite my [his]…

The syntax given in the article is standard - a square-bracketed part replaces words in the original text that would otherwise appear there. Your proposed alternative is not standard.

(At least one example given in the article is incorrect usage, but the basic principle is normal and widely used.)

Post reply on HN