A quotation given to someone, with no source
quote-without-sourceon by default (info)Japanese / English
A quotation given to someone ("X said …") in a paragraph that gives no source
Example
How to fix
Name the source in the same paragraph: a link when it can be read online, or "(Author, Title, year)" or a footnote for a book or a paper. If no source can be found, do not give the words to the person until they can be checked. `chaff cite --scaffold <document>` writes these quotations as a quotes.json to fill in: put the source's file in each `source`, and `chaff cite <quotes.json>` checks that the words are really there.
Why it matters
A quotation given to someone ("X once said …", "according to X") is read as that person's words. With no source, nobody can check that the person said it, or said it that way; words change and speakers swap as a quotation is passed along, which is the commonest error in quoting. chaff cannot know who said what, but it can say there is nothing to check the quotation against. It points at a quotation in quotation marks given to someone by the words right after it or shortly before it ("said", "according to"; the words are in each language's word list), in a paragraph with no link, no footnote, no numbered citation and no year in brackets. A Markdown block quotation (`>`) with a dash line ("— Name") as its last line or right after it is given to someone too, and is pointed at when neither the quotation nor that line gives a source.
What it does not flag
A short quotation (the "Save" button, the word "source") names a word or a thing, not someone's words, and is not read. A quotation with no such words right after it or shortly before it is the writer's own words, a title or a paraphrase. In Japanese, words right after the quotation that suggest a wording rather than quote it (「…」と述べる方が適切です) are not read either, unless a word before the quotation gives it to someone; the word list quote-advice holds them. English has no such list yet. A link, a URL, a footnote ([^1]), a numbered citation ([3]) or a year in brackets ((1975)) in the same paragraph counts as a source. A `>` block quotation with no dash line ("— Name") does not say whose words it holds and is not read; a dash line with a year or a link ("— Name, Title (1975)") counts as a source. Whether the source is right is not checked here: `chaff cite` checks that. Blog posts, essays and papers are read. An organisation's articles quote the people they interviewed, and press releases and reports quote their own people or documents named by title, so they are left out by default, with manuals, specifications, contracts and statutes, fiction and speech.
Turning it off or relaxing it
Technical details
- Layer
- L2
- Status
- stable
- Severity
- info
- Languages
- Japanese and English
- Suited to
- blog, academic, docs, legal, 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
- blog/tech, blog/essay, academic/paper
- Turned off by the genre in
- blog/owned-media, legal/contract, legal/statute, legal/judgment, legal/patent, docs/manual, docs/faq, docs/glossary, literature/fiction, literature/essay, literature/poetry, literature/play, speech/address, speech/transcript
- Not suited to, and not run in
- technical/spec, technical/readme, business/proposal, business/report, business/email, business/press-release, business/meeting-notes
Message
"{quote}" is given to someone, but no source (a link, a footnote, a reference) is given
This page is built from the rule's definition file:packages/chaff/rules/quote-without-source.yaml