Punctuating Blogs
How do we write about blogs? I don't mean this in a discourse analysis sort of way, though I'm sure a dozen or so MA theses will be written on that very topic over the next few years. I mean punctuation. There is some consistency, it seems to me, in the way that we do it, and I want to suggest that we should modify some of these habits before they become too ingrained.
Currently, we do not particularly punctuate blogs or bloggers. Which is to say, we rely on the hyperlink to provide a visual distinction for blog titles and for pseudonyms. For example, I can refer you to Brian's Study Breaks or wood s lot without fear that you will mistake my grammar or punctuation for an error. I can also recommend that you read Brian Ulrich without having to specify the title, kind of an automatic bibliographic notation. If I refer to a talking points memo, it means something different than if I refer to the Talking Points Memo. I can even refer to pseudonyms like sepoy or farangi or ignore them by referring to Manan Ahmed and Steve Marlowe. Hyperlink is good for that, I admit. Doesn't matter if I say Tim Burke or Easily Distracted or http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1/, it's all the same thing. Epynomous bloggers present a distinct challenge, though, since you do sometimes want to distinguish between the person and the publication.
But what if I don't want to link? There are times when you want to mention a website but don't want to actually encourage people to visit there or raise their Google or TTLB scores? Sometimes you want to be able to talk about blogs or bloggers without bothering to hyperlink everything. Or what if I'm writing in ... heaven forbid ... print? What if I were writing a job letter, and wanted to actually point out my on-line activities (instead of burying them on the last page of the CV, with the committee assignments and professional memberships)
Obviously some extra information may be put in parentheses or in notes, if you're doing that sort of thing. But I would like to open a discussion, which I hope to see the results of in the next edition of the venerable Chicago Manual, about the proper non-hyperlink punctuation of blogs and bloggers. So, my proposals:
- When writing on-line, hyperlinking is adequate notation for blogs, posts or bloggers. Otherwise:
- Blog titles should be in italics, just as journals and newspapers and other periodical publications.
- Blog post titles should be in quotation marks, the same as newspaper or journal articles.
- Pseudonyms are a little harder to pin down. In traditional print they are not set off, but they are identified as such in bibliographic citations. But the pseudonyms used on-line are not limited to normal sounding names (e.g. George Eliot, Juan Non-Volokh) or single-name variants (e.g. Voltaire). Now we have Another Damned Medievalist and the Madman of Chu (though his name is clearly stated on his blog), Fontana Labs, and a whole host of bloggers whose first names are obvious but whose last names are not, or whose posting name is entirely, or mostly, initials. Not to mention the oddities that show up in comments in non-registration systems. My thought would be to use quotation marks to offset the odder ones, and traditional [pseud.] notation for the more normal ones.