Quoting out of context

The review blurb

A newspaper review of a play reads: “The first act is a stunning achievement. Then the second act arrives, and everything the first act built collapses into two hours of shouting.” The theater’s poster quotes the review: “A stunning achievement.”

The three words appear in the review, but the review’s verdict was the opposite. Removing the rest turns praise of one act into praise of the whole play. This is the clear-cut case, and a familiar one: McGlone names promoting products as one of the uses of contextomy in the mass media.

“Nasty, brutish, and short”

A student writes in an essay: “Thomas Hobbes believed human life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ So he thought people are wicked by nature and life isn’t worth much.”

In Leviathan (1651) the phrase ends a long description of a specific condition: a time “wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall”, with no common power to keep them in awe. It describes life without government, not life as such. A few lines later, comparing his account with the everyday habit of locking one’s doors, Hobbes adds: “But neither of us accuse mans nature in it.” The student has turned a conditional claim (“life would be like this, without a state”) into an unconditional one, and then drawn a conclusion Hobbes explicitly denied. It’s easy to do in good faith: the phrase is famous on its own.

The dropped condition

In a planning thread, Alex writes: “I’d support pushing the launch to March if testing isn’t finished by the end of January.” In a later meeting, a colleague who wants the delay says: “Even Alex agrees. Her words were, ‘I’d support pushing the launch to March.’”

The quote is word for word, and nothing has been added. But Alex’s support was conditional, and the condition has been cut. Testing might finish on time, in which case Alex has said nothing in favor of a delay. This version is harder to catch than the blurb, because the missing words are at the end of the same sentence and the colleague may genuinely remember it that way.

• Dropping a qualification or condition: “if”, “unless”, “in most cases”, “for now”, as in the launch example.
• Excerpting praise from a mixed or negative judgment: the review blurb.
• Quoting a view the speaker was describing, not holding: a writer sets out an opposing argument in order to answer it, and the summary is quoted as their own position.
• Stripping the setting: a joke, a hypothetical, or a line spoken by a character in a play or novel quoted as a sincere statement.
• Dropping the question: “Yes, absolutely” quoted as an answer to a different question than the one asked.

Names. McGlone defines contextomy as the selective excerpting of words from their original linguistic context in a way that distorts the source’s intended meaning. Boller and George, in a book on misquotations, credit the writer Milton Mayer with the word. In argumentation theory, Walton and Macagno (2010) analyze a closely related fallacy they call wrenching from context, in which a quotation is used to attribute commitments the speaker doesn’t have. They draw the lines between it and neighboring errors, such as neglecting a qualification, more finely than this page does.

Relation to the straw man. When the out-of-context quote is used to attack the speaker, the result is a Straw man built from the speaker’s own words: the refuted position is one they never held. Quoting out of context can also be used to recruit someone, as in the launch and blurb examples, where the distorted quote is offered as support rather than as a target. A quote selected for being unrepresentative of a body of work, without distorting any single passage, is closer to Suppressed evidence.

Every quotation leaves out context. Quoting is only a fallacy when what’s left out changes the meaning.

• The excerpt means the same thing in context. Omitted words that don’t bear on the point, even marked with an ellipsis, are fine.
• The context is supplied or pointed to. “She added that this applies only to the first act” or a link to the full text lets the audience check.
• The speaker’s words were unqualified. If they said it plainly, quoting it plainly is fair, even if they’d now like to add a qualification. Later regret isn’t missing context.
• The quote is about the words themselves. Discussing a phrase’s history or wording, rather than its author’s view, doesn’t claim anything about what the author meant.

The test: would someone who read the full passage come away with the same understanding of what the speaker meant as someone who read only the quote?

The trimmed rave

The review reads: “Despite a slow ten minutes at the start, which the cast clearly needed to warm up, this is the funniest production of the play I have seen in twenty years.” The poster says: “The funniest production of the play I have seen in twenty years.”

This cuts more than half of the sentence, which is exactly the move in the review blurb example. But the excerpt means the same thing in context: the reviewer’s overall verdict was that it was the funniest production, and the omitted clause is a minor reservation that doesn’t reverse it. A reader of the full review would agree the poster is fair.

Quoting the plain statement

At a club meeting, the treasurer says flatly: “We can’t afford a new projector this year.” Two months later, a member proposes buying one, and another replies: “The treasurer told us, ‘We can’t afford a new projector this year.’ Has something changed?”

The treasurer might now say the remark was offhand. But the words were unqualified when they were said, the context (a budget discussion) matches the way they’re being used, and the member asks whether anything has changed rather than treating the quote as final. Quoting someone accurately in the sense they meant isn’t made unfair by their later wish to soften it.

A quote carries the authority of the speaker’s own words. An audience that sees quotation marks tends to take the meaning as given, and very few check the source. The excerpt is also usually shorter and sharper than the original, which makes it more memorable and more likely to be repeated, until the short version is the only one anyone remembers, as with Hobbes’s phrase.

McGlone’s research suggests the damage can outlast a correction. His 2005 paper in Media, Culture & Society argues that a contextomized quotation not only gives audiences a false impression of the source’s intentions but can contaminate how they interpret the quote once it is restored to its context. In an experiment reported in the Journal of Communication the same year, participants read fabricated quotes about a contested public policy, one of which had been excerpted from a neutral paragraph to make its source seem for or against the policy. When they later read the full paragraph, participants who had been encouraged to infer the sources’ attitudes revised their judgments less than those prompted to think about unrelated characteristics. (This summary is based on the paper’s abstract; it is a single experiment.)

• Find the original. Read at least the paragraph around the quote, and the question it answered if it was spoken.
• Look for the missing hinge words: “if”, “but”, “unless”, “some say”, “suppose”. They are what excerpting most often removes.
• Restore, don’t just deny. Quoting the full sentence back is usually more convincing than saying “that was out of context.”
• When quoting others, ask whether the person quoted would recognize your excerpt as what they meant, and quote the condition along with the claim.