From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" -- a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I've ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.

For obvious reasons, I can't share the whole Infocom Drive. But I have to share some of the best parts. It's just too good.

Update, Apr 19: On his Mechanisms blog, Kirschenbaum issued an invitation to SHU students who have questions for him. I invite you to take him up on his offer, and post your agenda items on his book blog (if you wish).

Quotations can make or break an academic argument. Some quotations, like the ones Johnson calls "the bedrock of scholarly discourse" (35), are "tightly integrated into the very fabric of the argument" (Smith 234).  The author carefully selects "the juciest, most meaning-laden words" (Lee 125) from multiple different authors, and works them into "an original chain of thoughts" (Johnson 131) linked by a structure designed to guide the reader toward a "non-obvious conclusion" (Brown 101).

But I also want to talk about a different kind of quotation -- one that the author prefaces with a wordy introduction that wastes words by referring directly to the mechanics of scholarly work.  We see an example of this kind of wordy, inefficient use of an outside source in the way that I am introducing the next quotation.

When an author spends two or three sentences calling attention to the fact that a good quote is coming that will illustrate a certain point, the author has usually already made that point through paraphrase by the time the quote actually comes around. Continuing with a paragraph that summarizes the outside author's main point makes the quote itself even more painfully extraneous. (McTeague 156)

As this quote shows, the habit of first talking in general about a topic, then quoting a long passage that supports a specific claim, and then following up with several more sentences that summarize the content of the quote, distracts from the author's ability to support an original argument. McTeague is saying that the habit of writing three separate sections -- the introduction, the quote itself, and the explanation of the quote -- can be very wordy, if you think in terms of writing several sentences for each section. You can generate a lot of words that fill the page, but the redundancy means that those words will contain few ideas.

On the other hand, a scholarly argument that quotes only the "most meaning-laden words" (Lee 125) not only avoids redundancy, but "results in more persuasive arguments" (McTeague 158) that enable both reader and writer to "engage with abstract ideas on a more advanced level" (Smith 230).