Citing blogs #2: legal writing and more MLA, APA & Chicago examples

I'm not an academic and therefore (quite happily) free from the need to squeeze a modern resource into an complex set of citation rules. Still, I enjoy digging around to find good resources, so here's a followup to Saturday's post.

In 2006, the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) updated their manual to include a rule for citing blogs. It doesn't appear to be online (gotta buy the book), but a blogger provided an example:

Raymond P. Ward, Minor Wisdom, How to Cite a Blog http://raymondpward.typepad.com/rainman2/2006/03/how_to_cite_a_b.html (Mar. 27, 2006).

Key points: includes the title of the actual blog entry, the date posted, and the permalink URL (assuming the example is accurate and Ray's bullet list isn't precise). See the post for details.

I found another source for MLA ("humanities style") citation. MLA Formatting and Style Guide: Works Cited: Electronic Sources - The OWL at Purdue

Hawhee, Debra. "Hail, Speech!" Weblog entry. Blogos. 30 April 2007. 23 May 2007 <http://dhawhee.blogs.com/d_hawhee/2007/04/index.html>.

That looks sensible -- other than the silly angle brackets. It's missing an explicit label to distinguished date posted from data accessed, but perhaps it's too much to expect a set of arcane rules to yield a self-documenting result. See their additional examples for a corporate blog and comments.

The MLA (Modern Language Association) doesn't mention blogs, but has a 15 item list and several examples. (Hat tip: An Anatomy and Physiology Blog which includes 2 other sources that don't mention blogs but may still prove useful.)

Yale's Writing Center provides samples in MLA, APA & Chicago styles, though makes the obvious mistake of listing the hosting provider (e.g. Blogspot) as "sponsor". Granted they discuss the issue in the comments, but that's no excuse for getting the examples wrong.

As an aside, it's amusing how the very credentialed world of academia views the rather informal world of blogs (emphasis added):

Blogs—an abbreviation of “weblogs”—are websites or areas of websites devoted to dated reflections by the site’s author. Many blogs are hosted on or presented as private websites where the author claims little special expertise or no professional affiliation relevant to the blog’s topic.

That's true enough, though I'll bet it's also true that most blogs with any real following in a particular field are written by those with "special expertise" and often "professional affiliation" in the field. That's a key reason people read blogs: to go directly to the experts (or at least a wider variety of viewpoints) rather than relying on reporters to filter information that's clearly outside their areas of expertise.