Pandemic Prediction Checklist: H5N1
Pandemic Prediction Checklist: Monkeypox
Correlation may imply some sort of causal link.
For guessing its direction, simple models help you think.
Controlled experiments, if they are well beyond the brink
Of .05 significance will make your unknowns shrink.
Replications show there’s something new under the sun.
Did one cause the other? Did the other cause the one?
Are they both controlled by what has already begun?
Or was it their coincidence that caused it to be done?
I respectfully disagree. As with the minor edit on the Boccaccio quote in another of my comments here, eliminating quotes fundamentally changes the way we interpret the scene.
With quotes (and especially with the way dialog is typically paragraphed), human speech is implicitly shown to be so drastically separate from the sensory component of the scene that it requires completely different formatting from the rest of the text.
By eliminating quotes and dialog paragraphing, human speech becomes just another element in the scene being depicted, not separate or any more or less important than the action of screwing down the plastic cap or the functional importance of the oil in the lamp.
The absence of quotes only makes it harder to read if you, the reader, resist this aesthetic and try to force the dialog to be of greater importance than McCarthy is allowing it to be in his novel.
See how the social interaction between Papa and the boy is now positioned as separate from and more important than Papa’s work on the lamp?
Even if you just add quotation marks, the marks call special and separate attention to the dialog, placing it as a separate component of the paragraph.