On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 2:23 PM, Jay Litwyn brewhaha@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca wrote:
From http://www.theracetothebottom.org/ward-churchill/
"Use of quotation marks. The committee asserted that quotations around "mixed blood" and "full blood" Indians in Churchill's work implies the Allotment Act contains these terms verbatim, and because the Act does not expressly contain this language, this constitutes academic misconduct. Cheyfitz disagreed and stated quotation marks serve many purposes, and the use of quotations here does not necessarily imply these words were used in the Act."
What use of quotation marks in everyday literature does not mean you are quoting someone verbatim? (I hav used them to distinguish pronunciation from spelling in alt.usage.english, and to denote strings in computer code, and that is about all). When you are explaining what someone else means, then you enclose it in square brackets. That is what newspapers here do, anyway.
One might call this a 'fake choice', omitting a variety of literary devices such as scare quotes; or so the 'putative interlocutor' I use rhetorically in this email would say. This writer would refer you to the multiple usages in [[scare quotes]], just as a start.