Internet Attribution

I got "A"s on my papers in college.

Well, most of the time. There was a "Personal Creed" paper I had to do on eschatology which earned me a "C" because--as the professor told me in his scribblings on the page--it was "NOT a paper to share my personal beliefs" (which happened to go against his own on his pet subject).

Personal Creed ... NOT my personal beliefs. --?

Wow, how did I get there? Sorry, I still have issues. Veering back on topic.

My college grades proved me to be a gud ryter. m'kay?

But I struggled with proper citation in High School, especially when we were told to follow the "official MLA format" which varied from year to year and depended largely on what your teacher thought. So much for "standardized citation" (Holzmann, 48).

I never got in trouble for plagiarism, but I did get docked now and again for putting a comma on the wrong side of this or that, or missing a semicolon somewhere. But now that I'm out here in the Blogosphere, I'm discovering that I am again struggling with "proper citation," and others have this issue as well. I do love links, so I don't think I've committed blog plagiarism yet, but it raises sparks when it happens. [NB: The linked issue has been resolved in the comments.]

This whole issue reminded me of something Weird Al has said: Misattribution is his biggest problem with file sharing. And he has put his songs where his mouth is. [Look at that logical fallacy: Appeal to authority. Oh well. This is a blog post, not a logic midterm.]

What do I do to deserve a "C" for blog standard links?

It's a little thing called "Hat Tips" that I'm still getting my head around. I have yet to do a hat tip, and I feel like I should put one here, but I can't remember which blog it was where I first noticed this concept... which proves to me the importance of hat tipping.

Hat Tip