I think you're missing an important distinction. When paraphrasing a group of people or stating a cultural zeitgeist, quotes are acceptable:
> The gist of the HN community's opinion is, "don't use quotation marks when paraphrasing."
> Lately the Democrats approach has been, "oppose Trump at every turn."
However, when paraphrasing a specific individual, it is frowned upon at best[1][2], and considered intentionally misleading at worst[3], to put paraphrases in quotes.
> pvg said, "I don't care what HN thinks, I'll do what I want."
> pvg continued with, "no one else cares what HN thinks either."
Contrast that with,
> pvg said that "only harcore lispers" care about how paraphrasing works.
In the last example, you can clearly tell the direct quote from the paraphrase. This is very important when communicating someone else's ideas.
Regardless of hard and fast "rules" of punctuation and grammar, you have a large number of people calling your writing misleading, confusing, and inaccurate. Clear communications should be the goal of any writing; wouldn't you be best served by hearing and incorporating this feedback?
[2] Purdue: "Indirect quotations are not exact wordings but rather rephrasings or summaries of another person's words. In this case, it is not necessary to use quotation marks" (note that no example of indirect quotations include quotation marks) - https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/577/01/
Do you feel that my paraphrase was intentionally misleading, or even confusing, or innacurrate? Even unintentionally? Does anybody? Does anybody think the norm currently being debated yielded any actual tangible value in this thread? Did it save someone from misunderstanding Comcast's position?
A lot of zeros and ones are being spilled on behalf of the abstract principle how quotes can be hypothetically used abused and interpreted, but none of the 40+ comments beneath my now-flagged paraphrase of Comcast's statement is actually arguing that my paraphrase was in any way distorting or misleading.
So I question the value of this norm, if the practical way it tangibly cashes out is in the form of extremely long derailments substantively unrelated to the the comment that caused the rule to be invoked.
That exhaustingly (if not exhaustively) describes a number of important distinctions that never come up when some hapless commenter gets told off they're using quotes wrong. It's a Talmudic absurdity to apply to a message board. We don't have 70 comment threads about the proper use of "it's" vs "its", with MLA citations (which, it's worth recalling, "specifies guidelines for formatting manuscripts and using the English language in writing")
It's just a dumb, arbitrary rule. It serves no purpose beyond facilitating righteous rebuke. You can make a better rule dealing with the underlying behaviour while oxygen deprived from screaming at dang about HN's political bias.
> The gist of the HN community's opinion is, "don't use quotation marks when paraphrasing."
> Lately the Democrats approach has been, "oppose Trump at every turn."
However, when paraphrasing a specific individual, it is frowned upon at best[1][2], and considered intentionally misleading at worst[3], to put paraphrases in quotes.
> pvg said, "I don't care what HN thinks, I'll do what I want."
> pvg continued with, "no one else cares what HN thinks either."
Contrast that with,
> pvg said that "only harcore lispers" care about how paraphrasing works.
In the last example, you can clearly tell the direct quote from the paraphrase. This is very important when communicating someone else's ideas.
Regardless of hard and fast "rules" of punctuation and grammar, you have a large number of people calling your writing misleading, confusing, and inaccurate. Clear communications should be the goal of any writing; wouldn't you be best served by hearing and incorporating this feedback?
[1] MLA: "Paraphrases and summaries do not use quotation marks" - http://www.lmu.edu/Assets/Academic+Affairs+Division/Academic...
[2] Purdue: "Indirect quotations are not exact wordings but rather rephrasings or summaries of another person's words. In this case, it is not necessary to use quotation marks" (note that no example of indirect quotations include quotation marks) - https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/577/01/
[3] "But then there's a long slide through confusion and bias into intentionally misleading quote-mangling and outright fabrication" - http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2013/10/17/gay_tal...