Is this medium called blogging something that I have somewhat outgrown? I’ve been giving it a lot of thought lately and I have been prone to writing mini-treatises instead of your typical blog posts. I won’t even try to explain why I write the way I do; suffice to say that in this medium, at times I feel a tad left out. The typical intro-blockquote-comment format—wash, rinse and repeat as many times necessary to prove a point—doesn’t seem to do much for me. For me it’s a case of been there, done that. I’ve been blogging for the better part of five years now, and I think I should have license to wax nostalgic now and again.

As an online writer I have grown to return to my roots of writing offline. My posts have grown lengthier, their scope, broader. I miss writing academic papers, especially now that I am not required to do so (and haven’t been for seven years). I’m far too familiar with the rules of attribution and quotation, of clear editing and paraphrasing. Herein lies my true nostalgia: it is far too easy to simply copy and paste and prepend and append with comments a passage one finds interesting. “What he said” is merely an approximate view into the mind of the quoter. Indeed, there are only so many ways one can paraphrase another, but the effort placed within, the words chosen by the writer is a window into their understanding of the work they are citing.

Such an act takes risk: to have one writer accuse mischaracterization of the person doing the quoting can be definitely embarassing, if not damaging. But isn’t it, too, a window into the way the quoted party writes? I suppose the motivation to blockquote may lean more towards a desire to keep the reader within the confines of one’s own writing (or lack thereof) but how presumptuous can we be about our readers’habits? There are readers who will take in a paraphrasing, others who will take in a direct quote, and others who will follow a link and go back to the post that led them there. We just can’t know for sure. What I do know is that I see more into a writer’s mind who does their best to sum up a text than to merely post a direct quote. Isn’t that the need that social bookmarking sites try to meet?