Hey, a post from my blog is used as the example in the DK Handbook, a visual guide for English composition that looks like those visual guides to StarWars or pregnancy or whatever but deals with grammar and how to reference sources.

facsmile of a page from a book that shows a screenshot of a post in this blog as an example of a blog post

Why, though, have they put two different dates in the citation, and neither date is the date of the post? I’m guessing that the first date is wrong by mistake (5 May because of confusion about European dates – the month was 5 but they put that as the date as well?), and that the second date should have had an “Accessed” before it?

I’m thinking the correct citation would be

Rettberg, Jill Walker. “The Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs Blogs Differently to U.S. politicians.” jill/txt. 22 May 2007. Accessed 27 May 2007. < http://jilltxt.net/?p=2026>.

Anyway, I’m enjoying being the example. Thanks to William Wend for noticing!


Discover more from Jill Walker Rettberg

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

4 thoughts on “how to cite a blog”

  1. Mike

    The book is by Anne Wysocki, a blogger and scholar in rhetoric and composition and its subfield of computers and writing, and your blogging and scholarship — as you know from your interactions with Clancy Ratliff — has some fans in those fields of ours. Who knows? Maybe someday we’ll get to see a presentation from you at 4Cs or Computers & Writing. I think that would be pretty cool.

  2. Lohan G

    how to cite a blog http://jilltxt.net/?p=2500

  3. Anders

    The reference is in the style recommended by the Modern Language Association (MLA). It is in my opinion the by far most sensible of the many academic reference styles out there. According to the MLA style handbook, you don’t need to but in the ‘accessed’. OK, that may not be so sensible, but you learn it quickly. http://www.mla.org/style

  4. Jill Walker Rettberg

    OK, so you don’t need “Accessed”. But they should have gotten the date for the actual blog post correct. Ah well.

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

screenshot of blogpost from sept 11, 2001, about blogger.com showing blog posts about the attacks
Networked Politics social media

25 years since September 11

I’ve been reading through my blog posts on September 11, 2001 and the days that followed. The things that stand out to me – in addition to the horror of the attack itself – are how massively we (or at least I) used the web to understand what was happening, […]

AI STORIES

AI-generated stories have longer endings than human stories

My colleague Jessica Witte has just shared a preprint where she compared the emotional arcs of the stories we generated using gpt-4o-mini to those of human-authored (pre-2022) stories from the subreddit r/WritingPrompts, conveniently gathered in this dataset. She found a distinct difference in the endings of the LLM-generated stories: both […]

How to peer review a paper in 2026

Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist, wrote a useful list of what reviewers need to look out now that so many papers are bad science that looks good thanks to LLMs. Read her whole blog post, she explains it well, but here’s a brief version because I’m pretty sure we’ll be needing […]

“So what if it was ChatGPT? It *could* have been true!”

I recently read a good article on the different kinds of truth a language model operates with by Luke Mann, Liam Magee and Vanicka Arora, Truth Machines: Synthesizing Veracity in AI Language Models, but despite its lovely typology of truths (consensus, correspondence, coherence and pragmatic) it doesn’t help me with […]

AI STORIES

AI shimmer and sparkle

I have this hunch that sparkles and glow and shimmer are somehow a point in the latent spaces of LLMs that have more connections than you would expect. Perhaps their connotation to magic and to the unknown matches some of the mystique of genAI? Or perhaps these words are used […]