Books Blog: books.elliottback.com

If you’re a grammar fanatic, or even just an everyday English-speaker, you’ll be both fascinated and amazed at
the “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks. For example:

A submitter who prefers to remain anonymous sent me this. Talk about a front for the mob…

There’s also a fascinating Flickr group called “Quotation Mark” Abuse that’s well worth checking out. For those interested in the rules, quotation marks should be used to set off actual speech. The quotation mark can be further abused as a mark of irony, distancing the writer from the word or phrase contained. You can check out Wikipedia for more rules.

The NLM style guide now has a special format for citing blogs. Beyond how cool it is that blogs are considered authoritative enough to warrant their own formal citation style, the new “general format for a reference to a blog on the Internet” is remarkably sensitive to the temporal nature of the web. For example, this entry could be cited as:

Bäck E. Books Blog [Internet]. New York: Elliott Bäck. 2004 Nov - [cited 2007 Oct 12]. Available from: books.elliottback.com/?p=147

They strongly recommend including the word “blog” in the title if it is not already there to indicate that the citation refers to a blog. Also interesting is the date of publication, which is given as the date of the first post that can be found in the archives.