My friend (David) was writing a paper on
Kafka. In the story he was writing about, a
character quotes what another character has
said. Now David needs to quote this passage. The
problem is that introducing a quotation requires 1 set of
quotation marks. Then,
another is required when the character starts speaking, and a
third is needed when he starts quoting. But there are really only 2 types of quotes, double and single. His
solution was to make it a
block quote, and this avoid the outer set of quotation marks.
This solution works for him, but what happens when this section of his paper gets quoted? To indent another
level might work, but it wouldn't scale to more levels of quoting. I propose a
different solution: Use an inside-out method.
Here's what I mean:
"I loved the part of
Slow River in which Lore says 'kittens should be round' (Griffith, 1995)" (Turner, 1996)
Morrow's commentary on this passage was:
"Turner is a nutcase. Clearly, the line is nothing more than derivative tripe." (Morrow, 1997)
Bester commented on Morrow, saying,
"Morrow's insult of Turner was unprofessional and ignorant." (Bester 1998).
This solution scales to any level of commentary, without an excessive number of parentheses. In practice, it is very similar to the process of converting infix to postfix, and reading it is very much like
postfix evaluation.