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

141–150 of 206 posts

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#141

Post by Jach »

QuesnayJr wrote: post #111
Majromax wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To elaborate, it appears that American English treats "hospital" as a place. So you go to the hospital, just like you go to the airport, or the subway station. On the other hand, Commonwealth English treats "hospital" as something more like a state. You go to hospital just like you go to work.

That's a good way to think about it. I couldn't think of a rule for when I drop the article. I guess for the state in the US we would say "hospitalized". So I would say "he was hospitalized", unless the identity of "they" in the original quote was important.

If you refer to the place by its name, then I think you can drop the article. e.g. "I went to Burger King"; saying "I went to the Burger King" would be fine on its own but a bit odd if you're not going to add further clarifying information suggested by your use of "the", such as "... on main street (as opposed to the one on 5th)". Similarly, "I went to Overlake Medical Center (the nearest hospital)".

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#142

Post by theon144 »

exmadscientist wrote: post #8
tomc1985 wrote: 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…

>If what you suggest was truly necessary, wouldn't most complex dialogue in fiction be incomprehensible?

...no?

Fiction (or really any prose) has context and continuity, so it doesn't need to disambiguate. Context and continuity are lost when an excerpt is lifted as a quote. Hence the usage of [brackets].

Since this is painfully obvious, I'm struggling to see what did you mean to illustrate by referring to "complex dialogue"?

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#143

Post by dsjoerg »

tomc1985 wrote: 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 with you bigtime. I suspect some people on the other side of this question are not gramatically sensitive, or they are super literalist about the purpose of quotation.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#144

Post by jancsika »

Somehow this makes me think of a story about the Bush-era euphemism for torture: "extended interrogation techniques."

Everyone on Fox news taught themselves to use this euphemism in smooth, everyday punditry. It spread very quickly.

Later, perhaps around the mid 2000s or so, there was some additional talking point added about some prominent Democrat's support for torture after 9/11. Could have been Hilary in a Senate campaign, or Obama, or possibly someone else.

I remember eagerly watching all the Fox punditry shows to see how they squared the circle. It was fascinating-- they'd ramp up using the same kind of red-hot rhetoric one would expect for labeling the "other tribe" a hypocrite. But at the climax of their take they would trip over their words, having to actively think to avoid saying "torture" and instead to use the euphemism, "extended interrogation techniques." You could just feel their brains creating all of these effective smears-- "torture apologist," "fan of torture," or whatever-- and then studdering because they couldn't use any of them without admitting what Bush authorized was indeed torture.

Does anyone have a clip of any of this? I thought it was fascinating.

Anyhow, that initial quote with brackets reminded me of that. I guess the connection is:

1. finding a solution for a narrow problem: obsessively ensuring context and syntax of a quote is always crystal clear, or making oneself feel better about supporting monstrous government crimes

2. being duct taped into a corner when you want to do the thing you care about: write compelling prose, or bark mindlessly into a television camera

Edit: use the word "crimes" instead of "misbehavior" (Damn, that euphemisic propaganda is effective!)

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#146

Post by bobthepanda »

titzer wrote: post #133
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…

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 provena…

But now you’ve basically doubled or tripled the length of the whole sentence.

The primary usage I see of this is to replace some second or third person pronoun with the actual name of the person, which is much simpler than appending a short biography of the person and trivially easy to verify.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#147

Post by Buttons840 »

metafunctor wrote: post #78
exmadscientist wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This might be a language dependent thing. In my native language, Finnish, I don't think I've ever seen a quoted passage, quote marks intact, edited to grammatically fit in a sentence. A quote is a verbatim reproduction, a holy thing. Rather, you would work your sentence to accommodate for the quote. If you cannot do that, you'll leave out the quotes, and they are your words instead of a quote. Just because a quote do…

Do Finnish words have "tense"?

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#148

Post by moistbar »

craftinator wrote: post #138
moistbar wrote: post #137

The 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.

His argument includes that article, which essentially boils down to "if you're correcting someone's grammar, you're wrong" without taking into account contextual difficulties that may have been caused by said poor grammar." Similarly, the author of TFA ignores most, if not all, arguments regarding contextual clarity.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#149

Post by Buttons840 »

easton wrote: post #119

The reason I always did it in school was because we’d have maximum word limits on essays (either due to an evil teacher or time constraints on exams) and copying an entire quote when you only needed the beginning and end would eat up time you could use to write the analysis bits. Maybe I’ll grow out of it (or maybe I already have, given I rarely shorten quotes when writing for fun on the internet).

And in life there is also a word limit. People want to get back to their cat gifs, etc.

Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets

#150

Post by derriz »

tomc1985 wrote: 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…

Doesn't english already have a perfectly good way to support "molding the quote into the grammatical context"?

For example, if you don't like:

He said, "I will go to the city."

You can use:

He said that he would go to the city.

Quotes are useful because the text they surround can be ungrammatical or even contain non-words, for example phonetically describing dialect.

To be consistent you would have to insist that words in quotes should always conform to the grammatical context. This would make many current (useful) uses of quotes incorrect.

Post reply on HN