Technical note for Citations used in this blog.

I have traditionally used inline links for my citations within my blog. It’s a stylistic choice that I told myself I do for convenience, but I’ve recently read something that has made my question my choice.

In using inline quotes, the convenience is all mine as a writer. I can write what I want and move on, assuming for the sake of argument that I have made my case with proper citations, while my reader can click any of the links for the background. This passes the burden of proving any case I wish to make onto the reader, not onto myself. It’s a bad stylistic choice at best.

At worst, as Anallee pointed out in her recent post in The Bias, it creates a problem for people accessing the web using screen readers. The reader will try and organize the webpage using the links within, and the titles given to those links. It will then allow the user to move back and forth between the links, using those links as the practical map for understanding the website. ​(Annalee)​

It’s a great convenience when the right thing to do from an accessibility standpoint also just happens to be the right thing to do from a stylistic standpoint, and the internet would be a better place if we took more care of our citations anyway, so I will be replacing links with proper citations as I find them in my past writings, and using proper citations going forward.