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Hyperlinking (Tutorial)

(With apologies to Ruth Graham’s Slate.com piece “Mass Hysteria in Upstate New York,” from which I grabbed these sentences)

Basics of Hyperlinking 

If citing information from a “reputable source” (NY Times, WaPo, BBC, NPR, Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, any other major newspaper or news site, or academic paper), and citing title of piece, place your hyperlink over the title.

Very Meta Example: “With apologies to Ruth Graham’s Slate.com piece “Mass Hysteria in Upstate New York,” from which I grabbed these sentences”

If explicitly acknowledging origins of a piece, without citing title, insert hyperlink into the verb that indicates speech or writing. For example: hyperlink “said” or “argued” or “wrote”.

Example: “Several of the upstate New York victims and their families told the Today show that they’re not satisfied with the new diagnosis.”

If directly quoting from a piece, include the name of the person you’re quoting and the name of the publication. You can choose whether or not to place the hyperlink over all of this information. For example, Graham chose in the below example to hyperlink a large part of this sentence, but she could have just hyperlinked “put it”:

Example: “As girlhood guardian Caitlin Flanagan put it in the New York Times this weekend, ‘It is the cheerleaders and not the linebackers who come down with tics and stuttering.'”

If citing from a reputable source WITHOUT citing publication name or piece title, insert hyperlink at the point in your text where you represent the new information conveyed by the source.

Example: “On Saturday, Brockovich’s team was turned away by the school while trying to collect soil samples on the property.”

Example:  “In non-Western countries, demons and witchcraft are still sometimes blamed for outbreaks of fainting and fits [PDF].”

(Side note: If linking to a PDF, warn your reader in brackets!) 

Example:  “One professor speculated last year that ‘Stress, boredom, concern about their children and other factors among young females’ could have triggered a recent fainting epidemic among female factory workers in Cambodia.”

If citing from a questionable source, make sure that your own text represents the source of this information. You don’t necessarily need to say “This source is questionable”; just don’t drop the information in without flagging its source to your reader.

Example: “Some bloggers are now claiming that the upstate New York girls fell ill because of the HPV vaccine or fracking.”

Read more about discerning a source’s questionability here.

Since I know it’ll come up: For the purposes of this blog I am going to allow you to consider Wikipedia as a trusted source, and link to it without warning your reader.

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