Renditions

• Rendition Markers
• Quoting Others
• The art of juxtaposing parts
• A little highlighting

Rendition Markers

On this site is used several markers to denote what kind of technical abbreviation or rendition that was made in particular cases. Renditions are eased by conventional signs and other signs as well. There are various helpful and non-standard renditions markers on-site, typically put in square brackets - []. In the table you can see who they are and for what purposes they are used.

These rendition markers are shorthand ways of telling what sort of statements we are confronted with over and above verbatim quotes. Markers of various sorts tell quite accurately what sorts of modifications of original expressions we are dealing with.

Modifyer signs make citations and worked on quotations more fun, and much easier to read. And they do not have to break any rules of citation and rendition either. They function as more specified ways of referring to expressions and ideas of others. Accurate referral is a good gambit. Here is a table:

Markers	Meaning	Fit for, employed
With + or |	Selected keynotes assembled.	Showing the debt, perhaps. Handy in forming gist plainly and elegantly, fairly and squarely. And often shuffled too. Advance to get at a constructive meaning. When we twist and turn statements and phrases of others, and end up with something of our own, because none has said it exactly like that to our knowing, we either make it our own or - to ensure wide embarrassment or exasperation - we write "with" to denote some alleged debt of thinking.
Mod ¤	Modified	Where tough reservations or other articulations are preferrable, or stern carefulness seems best needed. May also be used to denote a mishmash "quote", ie, a concoction of isolated segments put together.
Ah \	Aha, ahem etc.	Offhand-looking mentions: "Seemingly tendentious; take a better look". This kind of abridgement may look wrong or perverted at first glance, but may be surprisingly apt in the wider perspective, which is perhaps detached from the original utterance - and ought perhaps to be reserved only for the best of friends, ideally.
At >	Antidote, against, or 'contrast it with -'	Going against tenets of others.
Hum	Humorous abstract	For the fun of it, after all.
Cr #	Crossed, au contraire	Aggravated.
Cf	compare (confer)	Here is a regular feature in the citation business, but it can be lifted.

ALERT: There are other abbreviations to use too, and the ones suggested above complement them where appropriate. Many regular and standardised abbreviations can make writing much easier and more accurate. Here are many: [Link]

Quoting Others

You are referred to the scheme above for the discussion that follows. Below is a verbatim quotation:

Great Britain's Royal Family, Mahatma Gandhi, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Tina Turner, and Yehudi Menuhin do not have much in common, except for the fact that they all have been strong supporters of homeopathic medicine. [Dana Ullman]

If we want to remove something from the quotation in order to make it more essential to our own purposes, more "snappy", less tendentious, or without parts that are not to our direct purpuses, we cut off what is not fit to our own ends and put three dots in place of what is left out. The omission of a word, phrase, line, paragraph, or more from a quoated passage is indicated by ellipsis, also called "dots". It is a standard way of doing it. However, different style manuals tell you to put the omission marks differently. For example, the MLA Handbook wants three dots in brackets, [. . .], whereas the Chicago Style Manual (CMS) counsels us to use three dots only, without brackets. [Mlh 86-89; Cmy 371-77]. Some manuals want three dots without space between them, but the two much used style guides referred to right above, want space between the ellipsis dots. The manuals also specify details to the end of non-confusing telling, and tell how to alter sources in precise ways, for example in the shape of extracts. Here we keep up with the CMS's simplest way of doing it:

"Great Britain's Royal Family, Mahatma Gandhi, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Tina Turner, and Yehudi Menuhin . . . have been strong supporters of homeopathic medicine. [Dana Ullman]"

In certain forms of writing, especially those that border on quotations in order to express much similar thoughts, many ellipses could eventually be annoying.

Have you thought that a lot of . . . (ellipses) in a sentence may be taken as an not-of-importance signal about yourself? If so, it is most often possible to render, to paraphrase. In such a case a common tip is to close the book and write down in your own words the content of the sentence to call on. This is one of the ways to avoid plagiarising others. Here is an example:

The Royal Family of Great Britain, Mahatma Gandhi, John D. Rockefeller Sr., Tina Turner, and Yehudi Menuhin have all strongly supported homeopathic medicine, writes Dana Ullman.

Instead of "writes" or "says" there are neat alternatives. Many are found in "cook books" of academic writing [▾Link]. Paraphrases coupled with salient quotations (abbreviated or not) make up a large part of ordinary, academic writing. As such it is much and faithfully recommended and upheld in many circles, as you hopefully are well aware of.

However, there are other ways to alter the expressions of others too and for inserting thoughts of your own in some text.

1. "WITH" - Instead of ellipses far and wide

Great Britain's Royal Family, Mahatma Gandhi, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Tina Turner, and Yehudi Menuhin have been strong supporters of homeopathic medicine. [With Dana Ullman. Ref.] Or [=Dana Ullman] or [²Dana Ullman]

NOTE: The period has been abbreviated, the significant meaning is still intact, and you show that you render - and in part how - by the signs in the brackets. So although it looks like a quotation, it is not; it may have been abbreviated in one or several places.

2. "MOD" - Modifying means

A bigger quotation:

"Great Britain's Royal Family, Mahatma Gandhi, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Tina Turner, and Yehudi Menuhin do not have much in common, except for the fact that they all have been strong supporters of homeopathic medicine. (1) There is one simple reason that these and other respected individuals the world over have supported homeopathic medicine: it works. [Dana Ullman]"

Paraphrasing it (there are often more than one way of doing it):

The one reason why the Royal Family and other celebrities have supported homeopathic medisine, is that it works, writes Dana Ullman.

The one reason why the Royal Family and other celebrities have supported homeopathic medisine, is that it works [Mod Dana Ullman].

3. "AH" - Abbreviating much, sometimes with offhand-looking effects etc

If you for some reason cut away much of one or more sentences as in making extracts, sometimes the phrases and segments that are "glued" together express what the author you cite or "cite" could have in mind. At other times the abbreviations give rise to other impressions. This is a field to explore.

If you signal straightway what you have done, it does not have to be called intellectual theft, tendentious, biased, or rude, but worth while. In effect, you play with segments and phrases. If you put them together in the order they appear in the original, you have a linear assortment. If you order them otherwise, shuffle them, that is, you have made use of a wider repertoire.

In other words, there are legitimate alternatives to quoting and paraphrasing in fair, unbiased or "neutral" looking ways; it is possible to have fun with quotations and half-quotations and so on.

In some cases severe abbreviations are "tailored" from phrases and sentence parts far apart in the first place. Bringing them together into a close unit, may evoke humour and the like. Thus, through "closing the gaps" that ellipes are, some extract-like, terse statements may look funny, or biased, and so on.

By signalling (marking) that you have left out much and perhaps thereby changed some basic intentions of the original, you may feel free to seem offhand-like, or maybe do formerly forbidden things in academic writing, and perhaps more important, avoid becoming a scapegoat from it, hopefully. The signals (markers) help against that. Thus the possibly offhand-looking gist you serve will not appear so maddening, after all. Here is another citation:

There is one simple reason that these and other respected individuals the world over have supported homeopathic medicine: it works.

The science and art of homeopathy embody [!] what many people envision as a 21st century medicine. Homeopathy is a medical approach that respects the wisdom of the body. It is an approach that utilizes medicines that stimulate the body's own immune and defense system to initiate the healing process [Dana Ullman].

More stringently:

One reason homeopathy is a medical approach is that it makes use of the healing process [ªDana Ullman].

NOTE: Severe abbreviations may or may not appear offhand-looking at first glance. It depends much on the skills of the reader. But here too we have come up with an alternative to mere paraphrasing, and that helps variation, which works against boredom too. We found that in some contexts it could be neat to make a nuance between the degrees of abbreviations and so on involved. Common academic citing can be crude in such respects, and its predominant styles may become boring to many, regrettably.

We may insert three dots in a row to show where something is left out (ellipses), or we can use markers at the end of the line or paragraph that say so in their own way. Let convenience guide the good choice. Other options exist too. "Derived utterances" is a keynote for this sort of approach, which admittedly looks tendentious or tricky at first encounter. However, there is supposedly depth to it, depth revealed by steady thinking, maybe for hours.

Pondering on key sentences may later prove much very helpful; that is the idea of sound study methods.

4. "HUM" - Uha (Danish: an expression of (quite humorous) dismay

Dana Ullman writes further:

Concepts in new physics offer further support for the notionthat [sic] living and non-living systems have inherent self-regulating, self-organizing, and self-healing capacities . . . fevers represent an effort of the organism to try to heal itself.

NOTE: If there are errors or typos in the original, you quote them and show they are quoted faithfully by yourself. The sign [sic] in brackets - or [!] - are means of that. The modified thought:

Concepts in new physics offer support for the notion that non-living systems have inherent self-regulating capacities, but fevers do not represent an effort of the corpse (non-living organism) to try to heal itself [ºDana Ullman].

NOTE: Where Ullman claims that non-living systems go for balance (homeostasis), what appears to be a certain inconsistency of his has been opposed by a fistlike antidote, which goes against much in the passages referred to.

5. "CR" - Aggravated

In the place referred to, Dana Ullman has this to say too:

Modern allergy treatment, likewise, utilizes the homeopathic approach by the use of small doses of allergens in order to create an antibody response.

Conventional medicine also uses homeopathic-like therapy in choosing radiation to treat people with cancer (radiation causes cancer), digitalis for heart conditions (digitalis creates heart conditions), and ritalin for hyperactive children (ritalin is an amphetamine-like drug which normally causes hyperactivity). Other examples are the use of nitroglycerine for heart conditions*, gold salts for arthritic conditions, and colchicine for gout.

NOTE: This marking [Cr] may be used if your response is something like au contraire, "to the contrary". If the source you draw on goes too far and oversteps rules of proper handling of information, it should not be allowed to pass - it may be gainsaid, in other words.

As a matter of fact, real treatments in most of the fields mentioned are different from what Ullman claims. So:

Modern allergy treatment (hyposensibilization) is not homeopathy. Nor is homeopathy proper much related to what takes place in radiation treatment or when people get physiologically effective doses of nitroglycerine for heart conditions either. [Cr Dana Ullman]

NOTE: You write and sign it off by [Cr] (or another sign to be established, perhaps \ if accepted) when you are disappointed. By the way, further down in his article Ullman oddly admits most of these things we have paid attention to in the au contraire bit above. But it has to be made clear, much as the proverb has it, that Ullman "cannot eat his cake and have it too". That is, you cannot first claim great similarity, and next disclaim it and think that no error has been made in this processing of information.

6. "CF" - 'See', 'Vide'

If we want to show the ideas of others in our own words, we paraphrase (render) and refer, and 'cf' with or without a dot at the end is a common sign for it. Example:

The conventional medical treatments referred to by Ullman do not really make use of a so-called law of similars, which is one of the postulates of old homeopathy, one that may be 'sawed off' quite a lot too. Also, the medical treatments above do not follow other fundamental principles of homeopathy [cf. Dana Ullman].

NOTE. The so-called law [principle] of similars is a thought up construct, perhaps not fit at all.

Further Notes

The link above to Ullman's Internet article, the in-text reference could be (Ullman 1991, 12) put in brackets. In the Works Cited (Bibliography it might be: Ullman, Dana: Discovering Homeopathy: Medicine for the 21st Century. Rev ed. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1991.

[Uhm 5] brings just the same in-text information as (Ullman 1991, 5). The full references are to be put in a bibliography.

Code letters, such as title acronyms and similar, can make referring and reading easy or convenient. Use of in-text code letters for works is common for such as books of the Bible, or any well defined corpus of books, such as Buddhist works in the Pali canon.

Internet articles that are referred to, need a Net address too, among other things.

Literature  

Cmy: The University of Chicago Press. The Chicago Manual of Style. 14th ed. London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Ebu: Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD. London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2009.

Hi: Smith, Carolyn D., ed, et al. Hilgard's Introduction to Psychology. 14th ed. Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth, 2003.

Ltp: Schunk, Dale. Learning Theories. An Educational Perspective. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2004.

Mmb: Buzan, Tony, with Barry Buzan. The Mind Map Book. Rev. ed. London: BBC Books, 1995.

Mlh: Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 5th ed. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1999.

Mum: Buzan, Tony. Make the Most of Your Mind. Rev. ed. London: Pan, 1988.

Peg: Cutts, Martin. The Plain English Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Say: Yogananda, Paramahansa. Sayings of Yogananda. Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1958.

Sop: Smith, Eliot R., and Diane M. Mackie. Social Psychology. 2nd ed. Hove: Psychology Press, 2000.

Tor: Buzan, Tony. Speed Reading. Rev. ed. London: David and Charles, 1988.

Uhm: Ullman, Dana: Discovering Homeopathy: Medicine for the 21st Century. Rev ed. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1991:5.

Uka: Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation. New York: Dell, 1967.

Uy: Buzan, Tony. Use Your Head. New, rev. ed. London: BBC Books, 1989.

Wrh: Rampolla, Mary Lynn. A Pocket Guide to Writing History. 4th ed. Boston: Bedford/St Martin's, 2004.



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