| Quotes help the reader identify possible alternative and even conflicting world views in the source materials. For example, suppose sources A and B come from two different schools of thought about the role of TDD in modern software development. Now I come along at write a new piece on TDD which uses their writings, without citation or quotes. It's unlikely that my new piece will be cohesive, because source A's quotes use the London school while source B uses the classic school, which use the same terms albeit with different nuances. I might not even realize there is a difference. While if I quote them, it's possible for a reader to figure out patterns I hadn't noticed in my sources. The citations also act as a normalization (in the relational sense) for how the different ideas are connected. With "Steve Freeman writes '...'" then a reader knows that I'm talking about London school, even if I don't know that. As an example, look at all of the study of the Bible in order to identify anonymous changes in authorship. The fact that such details can be teased out of the text shows that textual analysis does provide useful information. (Stylometric analysis, which identified Joe Klein as the author of 'Primary Colors', also shows that there is extra information in the text than just the words.) Quotes help reduce the cognitive load for future readers by making these cognitive shifts more clear. Perhaps the most extreme example of this is Borges' short story 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote', which "is often used to raise questions and discussion about the nature of authorship, appropriation and interpretation." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q... > Any derivative ideas may not be retransmitted, reproduced, rebroadcast You are exaggerating. For example, there are any number of derivative work of Tolkien, including parodies like National Lampoon's "Bored of the Rings", or Pat Murphy's rewrite of "The Hobbit" as the space opera "There and Back Again". These neither infringe upon copyright nor are generally considered plagiarism. Copyright infringement and plagiarism overlap in how they are created, but they are not the same. If I quote pages of text, with citation but without permission and beyond the limits of fair use, then that is copyright infringement but not plagiarism. If I pass off an out-of-copyright 19th century play as my own, then a playwright would call that plagiarism, even though there is no copyright infringement. |