I remember the very first time I heard about "hyperlinking," where a writer would willingly give readers wormholes to follow out of his story and out onto the great blue Internet. Seemed like just about the dumbest idea I'd ever heard of.
As if readers didn't have enough distractions!
Now my problem may be that I link too much. Like, in the blog item below, I linked "W.H. Auden" to his Wikipedia page.
But I did worry that the English majors who read this blog would resent the implication that they needed a brush-up on the poet. (As when a nervous in-law-to-be was talking to my dad about Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and mentioned parenthetically that Edward Albee was a 20th century playwright. My normally temperate father reacted later, "I don't need some traveling salesman from St. Louis to tell me who fucking Edward Albee is!")
I can think of at least two other reasons to control your linking: 1. Too many links makes an article look like a research project. 2. And by God, you don't want to give people too many paths out of your story.
Has anybody seen a guide to moderate linking?
For what it’s worth, I almost never follow hyperlinks from a story. I find it distracting, and can find the info. on my own if need be. However, I’ve gotten to the point that I just ignore them, as is the case with your blogs, David. As I was reading this I asked, “Does David even do hyperlinks?” So apparently they’re lost on me.
i actually like the hyperlinks because it tells me that you care about the reader and their ability to fully understand what you’re telling them. having said that, i admit that i rarely click on them; but they’re convenient to have in case i need them.
Sure, if you want to see an example of moderate hyperlinking, visit my blog, Communication at Work. (Uh-oh, that might lead people away from your blog! Sorry!)
Seriously, I only hyperlink when I believe it serves the reader. For example, the current blog post was inspired by an item on Susan Williams Cellura’s blog, so I linked to it so interested readers could see the context of the issue I addressed.