McGlone, M.S. (2005b). Contextomy: The art of quoting out of context. Media, Culture, & Society, 27, 511–22.
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Quoting out of context (sometimes referred to as contextomy or quote mining) is an informal fallacy in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning.Engel, Morris S., With Good Reason: An Introduction to Informal Fallacies (1994), pp. 106–07 Contextomies may be either intentional or accidental if someone misunderstands the meaning and omits something essential to clarifying it, thinking it to be non-essential. As a fallacy, quoting out of context differs from false attribution, in that the out of context quote is still attributed to the correct source.
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Sarfati, Jonathan (2000). Argument: 'Irreducible complexity' , from Refuting Evolution (Answers in Genesis). In an often misquoted passage from On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin appears to acknowledge the eye's development as a difficulty for his theory. However, the quote in context shows that Darwin actually had a very good understanding of the evolution of the eye (see fallacy of quoting out of context).
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Yeung claimed he has made no judgement on peaceful protesters and criticized Leung for quoting out of context. He has commented about the police that "I can see our selfless police officers work so hard to protect us. However, some people kept smearing them and cooking up fake news to mislead the public." During the protests in November, Yeung was helping the police in clearing roadblocks established by the protesters.
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Yet White uses it as a historical source. This is an error of critical judgement." Principe sums up White's book this way: "Refuting White is like shooting fish in a barrel. With his combination of bad sources, argument by assertion, quoting out of context, collectivism, and general reliance on exclamation, rather than evidence and argument, White’s is not a book to be taken seriously. Its real value is as a relic of its particular time and place, and as a museum of how not to write history...While we can look today with astonishment upon the shoddy character of Draper and White’s writings, their books have had enormous impact, and we can’t deny that.
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In the book's titular essay, Gordimer documents the publication history and fate of Burger's Daughter, and investigates the implications of the banning and unbanning of works in South Africa. The official communiqué by the Director of Publications, Richard Smith stating his reason for banning the book a month after publication is reproduced here in full. These charges include "propagating Communist opinions", "creating a psychosis of revolution and rebellion", and "making several unbridled attacks against the authority entrusted with the maintenance of law and order and the safety of the state". In another essay by Gordimer, "What the Book is About", she responds to each of the charges, showing how, by extensively quoting out of context, the Publications Control Board displayed their "inability ... to pass qualified judgment" on the book.
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Contextomy refers to the selective excerpting of words from their original linguistic context in a way that distorts the source's intended meaning, a practice commonly referred to as "quoting out of context". The problem here is not the removal of a quote from its original context per se (as all quotes are), but to the quoter's decision to exclude from the excerpt certain nearby phrases or sentences (which become "context" by virtue of the exclusion) that serve to clarify the intentions behind the selected words. Comparing this practice to surgical excision, journalist Milton Mayer coined the term "contextomy" to describe its use by Julius Streicher, editor of the infamous Nazi broadsheet Der Stürmer in Weimar-era Germany. To arouse anti-semitic sentiments among the weekly's working class Christian readership, Streicher regularly published truncated quotations from Talmudic texts that, in their shortened form, appear to advocate greed, slavery, and ritualistic murder.
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