One of the dark arts I learned as an English major was how to trim a quote. You write an English paper by thinking of an argument and then finding quotes in the text to support it. Your reader will encounter these quotes in the context of your argument, not the original material, so it’s important to crop and frame them in a way that makes sense. Like karate or bagpipes, this skill can be used for good but easily bends to evil. I present Madeleine Holden’s essay in Wondering Sound, Women Don’t Collect Music to Impress You, Dan Brooks.
Tag Archives: dan brooks
Friday links! This sounds familiar edition
Yesterday afternoon, gentleman of leisure Aaron Galbraith sent me a link to this post on TabooJive.com,* in which Mike Thurau considers an odd phenomenon of the iPhone’s autocorrect feature. I was familiar with the name Mike Thurau from our own Combat! blog Comments section; I was also familiar with the post, since I wrote it. The beauty of the internet is that you can copy an entire piece of writing, paste it into a text document with your name at the top, and send that text document to some editor without even having to type anything. Okay, you have to type the query email—“attached is a short piece about an amusing iPhone function my friend discovered”—but there are a lot of templates out there. I initially thought that the Norberto King thing was the only piece of my writing Mike Thurau had plagiarized. Then I found this select-all copy of a Combat! blog post about unboxing videos. Then I found a whole bunch more.