Thanks, Lisa, for bringing this up. There may be newbies or lurkers who are just beginning to look at the literature with a critical eye, and I think it's incredibly useful to have some tools to do that sort of necessary work.
How can readrs know what to believe if they can't identify credible sources? The WTBS is like the WeSaySo Corporation from that 1990s TV show "Dinosaurs": "It's true because WE SAY SO." And of course we all know what happened to the dinosaurs.
I love talking about this stuff. I taught freshman English at two universities when I was doing my graduate work, and I would have flunked any student who attributed sources and quoted material as poorly--and as deceptively!--as the WTBS does.
The first thing I noticed as a youngster learning about writing was the use of ellipses to remove information from quotes. I was reprimanded by an English teacher for using ellipses in such a way that the meaning of the quote was altered, and it made me wonder about the excessive use of the ellipsis in the Society's publications--since that's where I'd learned it in the first place!
To this day, I'm suspicious of an ellipsis. When I see one, I go running for the "Works Cited" page to check the original source. Really good authors will put the whole quote in a note for their readers if all they're doing is cutting for length. Even the merely competent will at least have a citation that allows the reader to locate the original item for purposes of comparison.
The use of brackets in editing is generally to make references clear, and it usually needs to be done when the author has made a hash of indefinite articles and/or pronouns or to clarify the original subject of a long quote.
The problem is that the WTBS rarely if ever sources material, and so readers never know for sure where the cuts were made or what the original subject might have been. When I read their literature now, I clench my jaw with frustration. That's the single most dishonest thing they do in their writing (well, other than the outright lies): Failing to provide adequate--or any--citations for source material.
I stress when teaching that every quote must have a citation and every claim of fact must have a source. Then we spend a great deal of time on evaluating sources. Most reasonable adults know that an item's mere appearance in print or on a Web site does not guarantee its veracity--that is, unless the adult in question is one of Jehovah's Witnesses, and the item in question was printed in WTBS materials. Then of course it must be true!
And I could write a linguistics paper on the sneaky way that WTBS writers use logical fallacies (wonderfully exposed in some earlier posts) and agentless passive construction to lead a naive reader blindly along a very shaky path of reasoning. (Example: "It is a well-known fact..." Well-known by whom? or "Throughout history..." Whose history? Reported by whom?)
My mother always used to tell me, usually while lecturing me about reading too much "worldly" literature, "You can't believe everything you read, you know!" Unfortunately, she's never applied the same rules to her own reading material. Arrgh.
Jankyn, sick of ellipses and brackets.
