I liked Issa’s notes, but this reduces my confidence that they’re a good idea in their current form. Heavily paraphrasing unscripted off-the-cuff remarks in a mildly hard-to-parse, very condensed / nuance-stripped form seems like a recipe for starting misunderstandings and rumors.
I do agree that partial sentences can be harder to parse in some cases. However, in this case, I think Issa’s condensation of the transcript did not lose the spirit. I can see how some people would have taken more time to parse his shorter version, but I think it wasn’t more prone to misinterpretation than the full transcript (in other words, it didn’t add to the issue of misinterpretation). In particular, I don’t see any nuance in the original transcript that was missing from Issa’s condensation.
ETA: As disclosed at the end of the post, I sponsored its writing and provided feedback. To the extent that I didn’t ask Issa to expand that section of the transcript, it shows that, even prior to publication, I thought it was reasonably clear.
I think the transcript and summary will read the same to a lot of people, and read differently to a lot of other people. Connotation and wording is a complicated thing, and a lot of nuance and tone is already lost just in going from spoken conversation to written transcript, even before any summarizing or paraphrasing occurs. I’m not super concerned about this specific incident, but it brought to my attention how likely this is to be a problem going forward.
I liked Issa’s notes, but this reduces my confidence that they’re a good idea in their current form. Heavily paraphrasing unscripted off-the-cuff remarks in a mildly hard-to-parse, very condensed / nuance-stripped form seems like a recipe for starting misunderstandings and rumors.
I do agree that partial sentences can be harder to parse in some cases. However, in this case, I think Issa’s condensation of the transcript did not lose the spirit. I can see how some people would have taken more time to parse his shorter version, but I think it wasn’t more prone to misinterpretation than the full transcript (in other words, it didn’t add to the issue of misinterpretation). In particular, I don’t see any nuance in the original transcript that was missing from Issa’s condensation.
ETA: As disclosed at the end of the post, I sponsored its writing and provided feedback. To the extent that I didn’t ask Issa to expand that section of the transcript, it shows that, even prior to publication, I thought it was reasonably clear.
I think the transcript and summary will read the same to a lot of people, and read differently to a lot of other people. Connotation and wording is a complicated thing, and a lot of nuance and tone is already lost just in going from spoken conversation to written transcript, even before any summarizing or paraphrasing occurs. I’m not super concerned about this specific incident, but it brought to my attention how likely this is to be a problem going forward.