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mattnewport comments on Generalizing From One Example - Less Wrong
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Can you back up your claim that it is conventional to attribute quotes by characters solely to the author? It doesn't seem to me that this is correct and searching Google I can't find a definitive answer, though I turned up this blog post that argues it is unethical. One of the commenters claims:
I think the distinction is useful and can be very important information if the character is expressing views contrary to the author's own.
ETA: From About.com on Shakespeare quotes:
Convention is what people do. The first post you cite demonstrates that TV shows don't source quotes. It implies that modern playwrights have their lines attributed to them. And despite your second source, your first endorses attribution to Shakespeare.
From the books on my shelves, Barzun is the only author who ever identifies characters, and inconsistently (and occasionally without the author at all!). I don't think he ever distinguishes narrators from the author, even when the narrator uses the first person. Like many people, he usually cites the source, so you can look it up to see if it is fiction. Many people quote without sources, but it is definitely correlated with looking like nonfiction. Robert Cialdini and Marvin Minski have many unsourced quotes. Minski quotes Asimov and Pope who are famous both for fiction and nonfiction! (I think he only quotes their nonfiction, but he attributes to Joyce the words, including "I," of Stephen Dedalus.) I think all of Cialdini's quotes are in the author's own voice, except Virgil. People don't source Juvenal, either. (ETA: Mimi Sheraton uses unsourced quotes, probably from fiction.)
Sure the Rand example is unethical, but there is always context that can be manipulated.
This is all considerably silly. Indeed, there is a convention that allows a citation of a quote to just the author without referencing the character. But doing so is informal and can be slightly unprofessional or grossly unethical depending on the context. The quote here is merely stylistic and so the decision to include additional information in the citation should just be based on whether or Yvain thinks it looks/flows better with the full cite. If Yvain wants to be more professional about it but keep the short cite he can footnote the full citation.
There. Done.
I would disagree with you in the general case but must agree in the specific - this particular point is not of great importance.
You have a number of unsourced examples of people not distinguishing between characters and authors. I could give you a number of examples of attribution for characters. Justifying your claim that it is conventional to ignore characters when attributing quotes requires more than a random selection of anecdotes. When I think of famous literary quotes I do not simply think Shakespeare, I think Hamlet, or Macbeth, the distinction is important.
If you have to defend a claim to 'convention' it's not really convention.