Weblogs, genres and individual differences

Abstract

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 biogra-phies. Then, the paper explores the impact of individ-ual differences between writers on their texts ’ contextu-ality/formality. It appears that Extraversion and Neu-roticism 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