Quote Clipping
Cutting a short audio or video excerpt to circulate as a standalone quotation.
Quote clipping is the practice of extracting seconds of speech from a longer recording — a podcast, hearing, interview, or livestream — and publishing it as a self-contained unit. Platform tools have made it near-frictionless, and clips now function as the dominant form of spoken quotation online.
The technique inherits every hazard of textual quotation and adds two. Audio removes the visible cues that a passage was hypothetical, ironic, or quoted from someone else; and editing seams are far harder to detect in speech than an ellipsis is in print.
Good practice mirrors good textual practice: publish the timestamp, link the full recording, avoid cuts inside a sentence, and never join non-adjacent statements without an audible or captioned marker.
Common mistake: clipping the answer without the question. A response reframed under a different premise is the audio-visual equivalent of quoting out of context.
“"...and that's why I'd abolish the whole department."”
Keep reading the glossary
A quotation stripped of the surrounding argument or occasion that made it mean what it originally meant.
A short, vivid extract from a longer speech, designed to be repeated by news media.
The practice of quoting selectively to misrepresent a source's overall meaning.
A short, image-anchored quote in the modern viral sense — quickly shared, easily altered, and prone to misattribution.