A quotation given to a speaker with no name
quote-unnamed-speakeron by default (info)Japanese / English
A quotation given to a speaker named only by a role ("…," said an analyst)
Example
How to fix
Name the speaker and where they work ("said Hanako Mori, an analyst at Minato Research"). If the person cannot be named, do not lean on the quotation: say it without it, or cite a document named by its title.
Why it matters
Press releases and reports back their claims with quotations. When the speaker of "Few products do this," said an analyst is not named, the reader can neither check with that person nor weigh where they stand, and may read it as the writer's own claim put in an unnamed mouth. chaff cannot know who said what, but it can say that nobody to check with is named. It points at a quotation in quotation marks whose speaker, right before or right after it, is only a role ("an analyst", "a source", "officials"; the roles are in each language's unnamed-speaker word list) with no name.
What it does not flag
A speaker with a name is not reported: a name after the role ("analyst Hanako Mori"), a name before it ("Hanako Mori, an analyst"), or a title (Ms, Dr). A role that is one person (the CEO of Acme) is not in the word list. A role that points back at someone named before ("the analyst", "our spokesperson"), a document named by its title, and a role that is not the speaker ("an official statement") are not reported. A quotation shorter than ten characters names a word or a thing and is not read. Only press releases and reports are read; elsewhere, quote-without-source looks for a quotation with no source.
Turning it off or relaxing it
Technical details
- Layer
- L2
- Status
- stable
- Severity
- info
- Languages
- Japanese and English
- Suited to
- business/press-release, business/report, legal, docs, academic, literature, speech
Levels
Set a level for this rule under rules in chaff.yaml. With nothing set, it runs at the level its genre gives it (see By genre below).
| strict | warning |
|---|---|
| normal | info |
| relaxed | info |
This rule has no limit to count to. A level sets how a finding is marked: relaxed keeps the finding and marks it a step lower.
By genre
- Runs by default in
- business/report, business/press-release
- Turned off by the genre in
- legal/contract, legal/statute, legal/judgment, legal/patent, docs/manual, docs/faq, docs/glossary, academic/paper, literature/fiction, literature/essay, literature/poetry, literature/play, speech/address, speech/transcript
- Not suited to, and not run in
- technical/spec, technical/readme, blog/tech, blog/essay, blog/owned-media, business/proposal, business/email, business/meeting-notes
Message
"{quote}" is given to "{speaker}", who is not named
This page is built from the rule's definition file:packages/chaff/rules/quote-unnamed-speaker.yaml