User talk:Tony1/Quotation workshop

Authoriality

"Authoriality" is a proper word in the English language, and its meaning is somewhat different from "authorship". (A precise definition would be the job of Wiktionary editors - the current definition in wikt:authoriality isn't worth a lot - but very roughly I would say that it means the quality of having an author, or having a concept of authorship, whereas the authorship of a work means its origin, or more narrowly the identity of its author.)

Admittedly, "authoriality" is much less frequent than "authorship", which makes it difficult to verify its existence (in proper English) using Google web search or a less comprehensive dictionary (like the Concise OED). But "authoriality" is commonly used in a certain academic area, circa literary criticism and semiotics (Umberto Eco's discipline), as can be verified using Google Book search or Google Scholar.

Therefore it might be useful to change this into an exercise on how to recognize and deal with special terms that are not used outside a certain area.

It would also be good if the workshop would contain some advice and training on avoiding the introduction of inaccuracies and factual errors during the copyediting process, a problem that unfortunately occurs quite often in Signpost articles.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 16:25, 29 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, the last jab is a bit harsh.
"Authoriality" wasn't in the dictionary I consulted, and was inappropriate in the context of the article. I'll revisit the exercise later.
"it might be useful to change this into an exercise on how to recognize and deal with special terms that are not used outside a certain area"—I want this to focus on quotation technique; special terms used inappropriately is better dealt with elsewhere. Tony (talk) 01:28, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well, OK, maybe I was a bit rude, and you know that I value your work for the Signpost, but it can be really frustrating if one has to correct corrections frequently. I care a lot about precision and factual accuracy, just like you care about language and style.

As I indicated, the word wasn't in the dictionary I consulted either, but that was exactly my point.

A fuller quote from [1] is "We'll probably have a cultural situation similar to the one in the Middle Ages, where comments and comments were produced, and the authoriality was lost. Then, from the Romanticism on, the authoriality became excessive." What Eco is saying here is that there were times where people were generally very aware of who wrote what, and times where texts were more perceived like the general public (i.e. people who don't click on the version history link) reads WP articles today - generally not caring about who exactly has written them. That is not quite the same as not knowing who had written them (authorship lost). See also death of the author. Regards, HaeB (talk) 05:52, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Your point is perfectly valid if the exercise is meant to come from somewhere specific. But it's not meant to. The context is artificially created, and the exercise instructs the reader that "authoriality" is undesirable. The whole point is to encourage the mixing and matching (or deletion) of unnecessary ellipsis points and the opportunity they afford to use parenthetical square-bracketed text when adjacent to a problematic word. Yes, the exercise arose from my misunderstanding that "authoriality" (is there an uglier word?) is in fact appropriate; but in this context, that doesn't matter. I will think about how to substitute the word. My exercises are based on narrowly constructed faults and narrowly constructed solutions.

The Signpost, when cobbled together in a hurry at the last minute, often requires late-night editing (in my time-zone) in little scraps, when I am tired, after F and A has been attended to. It is not surprising that I make typographical slips; but they are usually obvious and easily fixable, whereas the edits I make include improved wordings, often not so obvious. It would be nice not to have the discovery of typos trumpeted in the edit-summaries, or perhaps I should explicitly lampoon in my edit-summaries every infelicity that I correct. Tony (talk) 08:12, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]