> it deploys a completely pointless set of brackets, mangling the wording of the quote, for no good reason.
Aaaand that’s enough of that article.
Stop defacing quotes with brackets
131–140 of 206 posts
Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets
#132The author might as well be spitting into the wind. No one cares about your pedantic opinion on a common and grammatically acceptable usage.
I agree with the author. Inserting brackets derails the flow. People know what a verbatim quote is. You don’t have to “translate” the pronoun. I’ve seen an uptick in this trend and it’s as welcome as pedantic ‘sics’ inserted into other people’s quotes.
For best effect you can insert bracketed additions, and add a SIC to point out the spelling error the author did not choose to fix.
Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets
#133This 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…
There is a way to do that by adding context outside the quote but keep the quote verbatim.
"It's an older code, sir, but it checks out", the officer said, referring to the stolen access code Han had just provided, stolen from god knows where, god knows how long ago.
See, now the original quote is undisturbed and the added context is less authoritative (on purpose), since it is not inserted into the quote. The provenance of all the information is clear.
Personally I think the only brackets we should use in quotes are [sic], indicating an error in the original. Otherwise we are on the slippery slope to, "oh, what they really meant to say is [phrase phrase phrase]".
Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets
#134I've always hated those brackets. I never know why they've bracketed the word and what it's supposed to mean. At least now I know it's purpose, but it's still confusing. I absolutely agree with the author's points.
Well now you know: It is to provide clarification, particularly with pronouns that have less context when one part of a quote is lifted into another conversation/article.
Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets
#135This 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…
Well a native speaker of English should be able to discern the inferred subject. None of the examples should give anyone any problems.
How ever there is a question should you take more care in writing when some of your audience has English as a second language?
Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets
#136This 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. N…
Bracketing acronym's on first use is a totally separate issue.
Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets
#137The author's decision to link to a Fecal-Age Gawker article with zero substance in the introduction made it very difficult for me to take the rest of the article seriously. That he bases his arguments on something with so little actually being said damages his credibility.
Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets
#138The author's decision to link to a Fecal-Age Gawker article with zero substance in the introduction made it very difficult for me to take the rest of the article seriously. That he bases his arguments on something with so little actually being said damages his credibility.
While he does nothing to bolster his credibility, his argument nevertheless stands on its own merritt. If you'd like to respond to that argument, please do so.
Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 counte…
Compression of text is basically never counterproductive as long as you use a suitable design.
Even a static huffman tree would help, and has no overhead. An entropy encoder would do very well and only cost a few bits to flush.
Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets
#140Hard 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…
"mold the quote" Are you quoting them, or not? Which is it? Seriously.
Quoting the meaning, not the words.