Are Blogs Edited? A Linguistic Survey of Italian Blogs Using Search Engines

Many blogs are written by people with no formal training in public writing; this could suggest a low level of editing and general correctness. A quantitative analysis of misspellings, however, shows that in their orthography Italian blogs are as well revised as conventional Italian newspaper texts. On the other hand, their editing is more careful than the editing of the average of Italian web pages. Context: an empirical grid The nature of the texts published on the Web is still poorly described from the linguistic viewpoint. References to the “informal” nature of all texts written for the Web can often still be found. This kind of view has been confuted in the past (see in particular Crystal 2001) but even in recent years descriptions of the linguistic features of real Web writing are scarce, even for blogs. In this survey we will take as a starting point for an orthographic analysis an empirical grid for the description of Web texts from the linguistic point of view presented in Tavosanis (2005). The grid is intended mainly as a compendium of words to enable linguists to speak more correctly about the texts published on the Web and to place particular phenomena in context. The whole classification, slightly different from current grids, is currently being tested on Italian Web pages; however, parts of it should also have wider implications and may be applied to other languages. The grid includes four layers of description directly related to the writing process. The first of these layers, “Time allowed for writing”, is constructed upon four main categories, related to specific types of texts: • fast unedited writing (forum postings and, occasionally, Web sites); includes text written without planning and without a second reading and/or correction. • fast revised writing (forum postings and, occasionally, Web sites); includes text written with some degree of planning and/correction. • conventional revised writing (Web sites and, occasionally, forum postings); includes text written within a process of planning and correction. • writing designed for other kinds of publishing (Web sites and, occasionally, forum postings); includes text written for other media mechanically copied and published on the Web. What kind of place can be allocated to blogs in this classification? A preliminary answer to this question will be provided in the Conclusion.