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Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Blogger PSA

The Debate Link is a blog. This individual entry is a blog post. If I refer to "my last blog", it presumably means a prior website I wrote for before moving to The Debate Link (no such site exists). It does not mean the last entry on this blog. Bloggers who use "blog" to refer to individual posts read like bloggers who non-ironically capitalize "Internet".

Thank you, and remember -- acculturation to the norms of the medium is everyone's responsibility.

3 comments:

  1. Agreed that it's incorrect to refer to a "blog" when you actually mean a post. However, I think capitalized internet is still standard style in most manuals. I've been revising something for publication lately and had to go through and capitalize all the internets.

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  2. PG is correct. The word Internet is properly capitalized. It is a custom-developed framework for communication, akin to a brand.

    At some point, there is likely to be more than one. Once that happens, we will have to refer to the specific one that is being used; no one will deny (I hope) that the "I" will have to be capitalized as part of the name. Only once we can refer to "an internet" generically can we use the word without capitalizing the first letter.

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  3. Pedantry: 90% of the time, youre going to make yourself look like an idiot.

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