How to quote a source, mostly a source found on the internet?
The answer is to quote it like Walter Martin used to quote his sources.
What Walter used to do was quote the source, the real source!
Listen to the debates of Martin against a JW and you will hear how this is done.
Walter would list a source, then tell the person, "Its written in the July 1972 Watchtower, that I just happen to have a copy of here" then pull out that very same Watchtower.
Thats how you quote a source!
You have the information as written or created, and have it so the other person you are talking to can read or watch the whole thing and make sure you are not taking things out of context.
Now in the age of the internet the same rules apply.
If you are in a debate over a religious point or talking about some teacher or a different religion, and you want to use a source to support what you are saying, do so by having the person able to read or watch the full real source as first written or created.
This means you dont want to just list a source that is not the original.
You want to prove that you know what you are talking about.
But the sad truth is, because of the nature of the way a computer can click copy/paste so quickly, it has become far too easy to post an address to a website that is not the original source but is a slanted source, and thereby not listing the things you want the other person to see in their original full context.
This is something Walter Martin would not do.
An example is as I gave above, where Walter Martin would try to have the original copy of whatever Mormon of JW source he was quoting.
If Walter Martin was quoting a Mormon newspaper's written work, he would try to have in his hands a photo copy of what he was quoting .
Walter was always telling people "Here, read the whole thing for yourself!"
This allowed the other person to see the full context of whatever Walter was quoting to make sure things were being told correctly.
It makes Walter's arguments look even stronger, because they are seen to be based on a very firm foundation of cold-hard
facts and not just the opinions of other people that happen to think the same as Walter.
On the flip side of this, is the modern tendency to post the address of slanted videos and slanted websites.
This is where you post an address to a video that was created to attack the thing you also plan to attack...
An example of this is when you wish to talk to a JW about the errors of their religion, and yet all you do is post the address of videos that are created to attack the JW religion.
Thats not going to help!
What these types of slanted websites and videos do, is take one or two sentences that someone might have said or written and use them to build an hour long video up attacking them over.
Mostly this is a problem because this will clearly look to the JW like the sentences were taken out of their context.
This is because the "source" you are quoting and referring the JW to is not the original !
I see this a lot of times happen when some guy wants to attack a Christian teacher, (Like Walter Martin) and they will post a link to a video attacking the Christian that will take one of two sentences the person said, and build up a huge attack against them for an hour, just over these few words.
And when you manage to track down the full context of what the person said, you will see that many times the anti-Christian video was taking words out of their context.
So my advice is this-
Do what Walter Martin used to teach us to do, and list the source....
Have it there for the other person to check....
Dont just lift a few words, but have the original there, or its web address so that every word you say can be confirmed!
Thats how its done.