Weblogs, Genres, and Individual Differences

Blogs are personal online diaries, and a relatively recent form of computer-mediated communication. What kind of writing do they contain? This paper adopts a measure of linguistic contextuality/formality, due to Heylighen and Dewaele, and applies it to a corpus of weblogs. It first compares the corpus with sub-corpora from the British National Corpus, and weblogs are shown to be more formal than e-mail, but less formal than biographies. Then, the paper explores the impact of individual differences between writers on their texts’ contextuality/formality. It appears that Extraversion and Neuroticism are less influential than previously supposed, and it is argued that gender and Agreeableness account for more of the variability in the extent to which weblog writers take their readers’ contexts into account.