Does one have to be sophisticated to understand the difference between providing a characterization of SA’s antecedent and providing the actual salient words from the antecedent?
Antecedent schmantecedent.
If one doesn’t want to risk making the reader question the contents inside the brackets, it behooves one to keep said contents value neutral.
We continue Through The Looking Glass.
Starving Artist commented on an antecedent statement that was not value neutral. Do you not grasp that this should be reported accurately when quoting SA? You are advocating misrepresenting that SA’s comment referred to some fictional value-neutral statement that you just invented. What you are suggesting is dishonest editorializing, and something that imo should warrant a warning under the rules.
For the benefit of those who might be wondering, I didn’t report the quote in question and don’t know who did…if anyone. Perhaps JC came upon it while reading the thread himself. I didn’t feel at the time that LHoD’s post was out of line and still don’t. Plus it appears that technically he was in the right anyway according to some of the instructions to be found in stickies within certain forums. So I echo the praise for Jonathan Chance for rescinding the warning, while at the same time I compliment him for striving to stay on top of things and uphold the standards of the board. I’m sure it’s hard to be aware of every instruction in every sticky in every forum, and especially in forums the mod perhaps hadn’t visited much before becoming a mod, or since.
Thanks, SA.
FWIW, I think the “public persona” substitution would have been bad for a very specific reason.
Trump’s public persona has multiple aspects. Sure, there’s the self-aggrandizing narcissist component. But there’s also the savvy businessman component, the strong man component, the tough dealmaker component, the not-afraid-to-speak-his-mind component. His public persona is multifaceted.
If I’d used that phrase, I would have made it sound like Starving Artist was calling all of that stuff (or, to be precise, most of it) an act. Remember that I quoted him disagreeing with “that.” It would have been twisting his words, or even an outright misquote, to imply that he was calling, for example, Trump’s business savvy an act.
Now, I don’t think Bricker, or anyone else, is suggesting “public persona” maliciously. But that’s the danger in paraphrasing what someone’s talking about: it can have unforeseen implications. That’s why I believe what I did–verbatim antecedent in brackets–was the wisest course.
Do you still think it was wiser than using the multi-quote function, in which case there would be no confusion about the source of “the antecedent”?
Can you see that there are times when using the verbatim antecedent might be the unwise choice, even if we restrict ourselves to the use of brackets?
The reason I ask that second question is there seems to be a sentiment among some posters here that “using the verbatim antecedent” grants some special immunity to the user such that it cannot be the wrong thing to do.
I definitely think it was a better form of communication. I don’t regret that some random people read it sloppily and misunderstood: if you read that sloppily, that’s on you. I regret that a moderator did so–but I still think that’s on him.
Yes, there are in theory times when someone’s point is so muddled that they fail to pay attention to what the antecedent to their pronoun is, and pointing out that antecedent may make them realize that they’d written poorly and not made the point they’d intended to make. Your example with losers and minimum wage illustrates that. In such a case, I’ll concede it’d be poor form to use brackets as a way to mock the person for their poor writing.
At least two moderators, not one. And one of them is, among other things, a professional nonfiction writer. But this has definitely more than played itself it out. Keep blaming the reader if you like.
I wouldn’t say that I misunderstood it (assuming you are talking about me - I’m a professional editor as well as a science writer). But using brackets in that way gives the appearance of injecting an editorial comment into someone else’s statement (especially since it wasn’t anything the person being quoted had said), even if that were not the intention of the writer. The person making the insertion in brackets is making a judgement on exactly what part of someone else’s quote the person being quoted was referring to with “that.” It wouldn’t be acceptable in a formal publication. If brackets were to be used, it would be better to use a more neutral formulation concerning the antecedent, e.g. “[Trump’s behavior].”
I appreciate the feedback, and take it seriously. However, I’m still hung up on two things. First isn’t it better to be as precise as possible? It seems to me that referring to the exact behavior is preferable to referring to general behavior in this case. If I referred to trumps behavior in general, I would risk suggesting that starving artist considered all of Trump’s behavior to be an act. Second, While technically I made an editorial decision that the antecedent was what I said it was, in this case I think the chance the antecedent was anything else was vanishingly small. Starving artist confirmed that I was right.
Yup, I agree.
I think if there’s really a concern for some combination of
(a) the subject matter is highly controversial;
(b) the antecedent/referent is even slightly ambiguous (although it wasn’t here);
(c) we feel the need to cater to careless readers (a moot point);
then the correct stylistic/editorial decision is to avoid square brackets altogether and multi-quote.
Even paraphrasing the antecedent within square brackets seems dubious at best to me. Here Colibri is advocating bowdlerizing or deliberately generalizing the antecedent within square brackets. This is not even neutral paraphrasing, this is imo editorializing, and this is explicitly the thing that is (correctly, imo) prohibited within the quote box under the rules.
I think the contents of square brackets should be as accurate and precise and value-free as possible - and by value-free I mean don’t change the values, don’t arbitrarily edit a controversial antecedent into a non-controversial one within a quote box. If a verbatim statement of the antecedent is really somehow problematic (although I don’t concede that it was here), don’t use square brackets at all.
That seems far less defensible to me (also an editor and science writer, though admittedly with a lot less experience). Starving Artist didn’t claim that “Trump’s behavior” was an act; he thought the “egotistical, self-aggrandizing narcissist” component of his behavior was. The “neutral formulation” referred to above changes the meaning of both the phrase that SA responded to and SA’s response, while LHoD’s posted structure preserves the exact wording and accurately represents the exchange. If I were to change anything in LHoD’s post, I’d add quotations marks around those words:
My opinion is that most of that [Trump being an ‘egotistical, self-aggrandizing narcissist’] is just an act.
With 50-50 hindsight, this would have been best in this case IMHO.
LHoD: “How does this make any sense?..”
But multiquoting carries its own problems. Let me try another formulation. Brackets added:
That doesn’t give the appearance of editorializing, but it accurately conveys what was said. The downside is wordiness.
I dislike the following bowdlerization, because it’s vaguer. Strunk and White might agree with me. Brackets added:
To be clear, I don’t think LHoD or anyone should be held to the best practice standard, nor are they.
The other downside is that it’s technically inaccurate.
SA wasn’t asserting that Superdude’s claim was an act (which is what you have him saying). He was asserting that Trump’s “egotistical, self-aggrandizing narcissist” persona is an act.
Had LHOD phrased it that way, he would be relying on people to assume that he had used incorrect syntax. Most people probably would make that assumption, but it’s better to use correct syntax to begin with.
With all the heat that has been generated, this is a rare moment of light. Excellent idea.
Oops. Furthermore, my formulation even insults Superdude a little. It was inadvertent! I swear! 
So nix my idea and substitute in Enginerd’s.
Since SA does not believe Trump IS “an 'egotistical, self-aggrandizing narcissist”, and since he posted that “It’s definitely a persona…” how about we leave out the “being” and just say:
[Trump’s persona as an egotistical, self-aggrandizing narcissist]
[QUOTE=LHoD, controversially]
…[Trump being an egotistical, self-aggrandizing narcissist]…
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=John Mace]
…[Trump’s persona as an egotistical, self-aggrandizing narcissist]…
[/QUOTE]
These are virtually indistinguishable to me. Who says that you can never change someone’s view on an issue by debate and logical argument?
Really, the whole issue could have been avoided by simply using the multiquote function. And in a similar case in the real world, I would have probably done the same and included the antecedent quote without making a judgement about what exactly the speaker was referring to.
As I said above, it you want to “accurately represent the exchange,” then just include the actual exchange.
When I see multiple quotes with no, or little, text between, my eyes want to glaze over and skip it. I seriously doubt I’m the only one with that temptation. I think that approach is unwieldy and risks losing audience members more than my approach did.
I do, however, very much like the idea of putting the words in quotation marks within the brackets, and am happy to use that approach going forward.