The Dangers of Using Popular Quotes Unverified

In the first installment of this series, I told the stories of three dodgy quotations I’ve encountered in some of my own editing adventures. In this follow-up post, I’d like to explain more about exactly why those three quotes are problematic and address one of the best ways to avoid such problems in your own writing. If you haven’t had a chance to look at the first post in the series, please do via the above link, since the following will refer to it heavily.

One main issue for the first two quotes is attribution. Both quotes were widely circulated on the internet, but credited to various people. I see these kinds of quotations all the time in my editing work, mainly because they’re the quotes that circulate the most widely over social media and show up the most easily in topical Google searches. More often than not, however, such quotes are very difficult to attribute and document. At the core, this is because most such quotes don’t really have clear “sources” at all–they’re simply popular aphorisms that float around in cyberspace and other domains of popular culture (word of mouth, popular self-help literature, business books, etc.), with different writers giving them different attributions, usually in order to attach them to “famous” names that seem to lend them greater authority: a quote’s going to seem to carry more weight if one attributes it to a well-known writer like Mark Twain rather than simply allowing it to be anonymous. Often, a popular influencer will either make up or perpetuate one such attribution, and then whatever attribution that influencer uses will circulate that much more widely because of that individual’s significant reach.

The Trouble with Poorly-Sourced Quotes

There are a few problems with these kinds of quotations, however.

For one, savvy readers will often be able to recognize the misattributions, which can affect those readers’ sense of the writer’s credibility. Quotes like these can backfire easily, giving readers an impression not of authority, but of laziness, of a writer who wasn’t really doing their homework.

For another, popular aphorisms can thin out your ideas rather than lend them authority. Popular quotations sourced from the internet are often as popular as they are because they are very general, designed to appeal to a wide variety of situations, so they can land as too pithy or cliché, directing emphasis away from your ideas by appealing to broad generalities. And, as in the case of the second example in my previous post, quoting a cartoon character runs the risk of making you sound like a cartoon character. While I don’t think such quotes are verboten as a hard and fast rule, bear in mind that using too many of them will make you sound more like a cliché-generator than someone writing with authority about what they know. So if you use any such quotes, use them sparingly: a little goes a very long way. And (as I’ll cover in more detail later), be sure to do your due diligence as a writer to figure out where the quote really came from. If it’s a popular aphorism that’s variously attributed, it’s usually better to acknowledge that fact than it is to run with an easily-caught misattribution.

The quote in my third example demonstrates another common pitfall of sourcing quotes from topical Google searches: very often, those quotes appear in isolation without any kind of context–and knowing the context can often drastically change a quote’s apparent meaning. In the case of my example, the writer used a partial Biblical quotation which seemed to mean one thing when presented in isolation, but, when read in the context of the broader passage in which it appears, wound up meaning the exact opposite of what it appeared to mean all by itself. Again, since there are plenty of Biblically-literate readers out there, such a mistake can undermine your credibility and garble your meaning.

Avoiding Dodgy Quotes

The first and most important principle in avoiding dodgy quotes is to realize that Google is not necessarily your friend. In fact, as I’ll address in the next post, thinking about just “finding quotes” rather than expressing what you know can be dangerous in itself. Most especially, topical Google searches for things like, say, “quotes about resilience,” can be especially problematic. That will lead you, primarily, to sources like inspirational quote sites, Goodreads, Reddit, and other sources. There are several problems with these:

1. Such quotes are very frequently misquoted, misattributed, or both.
2. While the sites will provide a basic (and untrustworthy) attribution, they never tell you where the quote really came from. Even if the attribution line says “Mark Twain,” it won’t tell you which work of Twain’s contains the quote. This can run you into difficulties down the road, partially because it can be quite difficult to verify the quote, and partially because, especially if you’re writing more formal nonfiction prose, finding the right information to include in a citation can become a real headache. Always ask yourself, “Where did this come from?” Don’t just think about names, but about sources–where and when did that writer or speaker say this? What book? What chapter? What page?
3. As mentioned above, such quotes often appear in isolation, and can mean very different things when set in context. It’s a good idea to actually track down the original quote in the text where it originally appeared so you can check that broader context for yourself. I’ll address how to do this in a future post.
4. They can make you sound like you’re cobbling together clichés and aphorisms, distracting readers from your real ideas rather than lending those ideas emphasis and authority.

Ultimately, there are simply many better ways to source and employ quotations to maximum effect in your writing. In future posts, I’ll cover exactly what those are.

Things to Come

So, keep an eye on this space! My goal is to create a series of brief posts about quoting well, which I’ll ultimately compile into a single resource.

Upcoming topics will include:

• Why Quote? The Purpose of Quoting in Nonfiction
• When to Quote–and When Not To
• Where To Find Your Best Quotes
• How to Source Your Quotes Credibly
• Proper Attribution and Documentation
• Incorporating Quotes Smoothly
• How to Track Down Suspicious Quotes
• Resources for Quoting Well

What other questions about quoting well do you have? If you’re a fellow editor, what other common pitfalls do you often see in your own editing experience? Please leave them in the comments, and I’ll address them in one or more of these upcoming posts.