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How else are you supposed to indicate that you're rephrasing something someone else said? It's generally pretty clear when something is an actual quote, and put
by wyager 10y ago
How else are you supposed to indicate that you're rephrasing something someone else said? It's generally pretty clear when something is an actual quote, and putting the quote in italics makes it very clear that it was not actually said.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoSomething like this, perhaps: For the teens, the psychologist's advice is literally: Well, maybe don't be such a bitch in the first place, Mom.
- gohrt 10y ago"literally"?
- brazzledazzle 10y ago"Essentially" might fit better. Fitting "distilled" in there might work too.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoLiterally has also been used for emphasis while not being literally true, since, I'm told, at least the period Shakespeare was slinging ink around.
- wyager 10y agoWhile readable, it's roughly as unpleasant to read as not indicating that it's a rephrasing at all.
- tptacek 10y agoIn prose, without quotation marks. I found it jarring the first time I got corrected for casually using quotation marks on HN (many years ago --- I think by Paul Graham!) and felt for sometime afterwards that it was evidence about how needlessly prickly the site is. But I'm now glad to have left the habit of using question marks rhetorically behind in pretty much all of my writing. You can still use quotes if you really want to; you just have to write clearly that you aren't making a literal quotation --- to be clear that you're not putting words in someone else's mouth. But I find that it's rarely worth the effort to do so.