Maybe the best thing here is to ask questions non stop.
"cry into [his] pillow."
Did they really say, "cry into pillow?"
No?
Why is the quote incorrect?
Was that really necessary?
Stop defacing quotes with brackets
171–180 of 206 posts
Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets
#172Personally, I don't mind seeing brackets in quotes, although I use parentheses instead.
What I really would like to see stopped is using curly quotes or apostrophes.
Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Although it happens often in natural communication, I find there is more chance for confusion, especially by a non-native reader, when a pronoun (or any proform) appears before its ante cedent. So resolving the pronoun with square brackets can be less confusing, to say nothing of the benefits of brevity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataphora
> I find there is more chance for confusion, especially by a non-native reader, when a pronoun (or any proform) appears before its antecedent.
It depends on the native language. Spanish is flexible to a fault, so "a huge orange cat", "an orange huge cat", and even "a cat orange huge" are easy to understand... but correctly translating "un enorme gato naranja" to English is the hard part.
Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That is already a thing. Simply put it in brackets and insert it into the quote. Overwriting the quote makes the expression unclear, which does require readers seek original expressions or otherwise speculate.
Yeah, that is a better solution. It's a simple, clear rule: never alter the original quote, but you can insert bracketed words to make it clearer.
Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Otherwise we are on the slippery slope to, "oh, what they really meant to say is [phrase phrase phrase]". Slippery slope arguments tend to ignore that if a result is actually unconscionable then regardless of the apparent slope we'll still actually stop somewhere. Additionally, they often could be applied just as well in reverse, indicating some sort of flaw in the reasoning: "We can no longer even substitute prope…
> Slippery slope arguments tend to ignore that if a result is actually unconscionable then regardless of the apparent slope we'll still actually stop somewhere.
I disagree. The point of the slippery slope argument is that no one knows where we'll stop, or if at all. We should be cautious in ever starting sliding.
Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Compression removes redundancy. It's literally the definition of compression! And reduced redundancy is always bad when reliable transmission is a priority over small size.
Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the US, you would use an article before "hospital": either "a" or "the".
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.
This is a really good way of defining the difference. Although for whatever reason, you are at work, but you are in hospital.
But English is weird like that isn't it. Considering that depending on where you live you can quite correctly do things "at the weekend", "on the weekend", "in the weekend", or even "over the weekend".
Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
Is that the standard syntax? I've always been led to believe square brackets are used to insert words that don't exist in the quote. > "go home and bite my [his] pillow." To me makes way more sense. If I was to read "go home and bite [his] pillow." I would assume the person being quoted had said ""go home and bite pillow." which makes almost no sense.
Yes, it is standard. Search the thread for MLA or manual. Academic papers are done this way and have been for a long time, and it's not hard to understand.
Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Compression removes redundancy. It's literally the definition of compression! And reduced redundancy is always bad when reliable transmission is a priority over small size.
If your news wire starts mangling data, you need to resend it, not guess.
And I bet you can get more reliability out of compressing and then adding error correction bits.
Re: Stop defacing quotes with brackets
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That is already a thing. Simply put it in brackets and insert it into the quote. Overwriting the quote makes the expression unclear, which does require readers seek original expressions or otherwise speculate.
I don’t think that “Heather spoke to [Sam] to the conference” vs “Heather spoke to her [Sam] at the conference” provides all that much meaningful clarity.