How to use sources

One of the most effective things you can do in persuasive internet writing is link liberally to your sources. 

You’ve already done the research, marshaled the data that lead you to an informed opinion, and strung it together to construct a data-backed map of the world, which you’re now helpfully sharing with your audience. Why would you not include the sources that got you there? Why show them only the end product, when instead you could invite them to take the whole journey themselves so they will come to the same conclusion as you using the same, ground-truth data sources? 

This is what the audience wants. Studies show that as the number of sources hyperlinked in an online piece of writing increases, the average length of reading time increases. 

It’s not just that the audience is more engaged. Pieces with frequent hyperlinks are more likely to be shared and readers are more likely to retain what they learned in the piece. Pieces with frequent hyperlinks are judged as more accurate and, because readers click on an average of 18% of all the hyperlinks included in writing in major publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, readers of heavily-hyperlinked pieces are actually more informed. 

I’m lying, of course.

None of the links in the text above support my arguments. They’re all pictures of cats. 

Like everything on the internet, hyperlinking is a double-edged sword. Yes, it’s great that you can point to the data that support your argument. That can be useful. But most hyperlinks don’t get clicked on. And when they do get clicked on, the reader is unlikely to read the full source, evaluate its validity, and track back to the original piece to determine whether it does in fact support the argument that the author claims it supports. 

Note that I didn’t include hyperlinks in any of the claims I made above. I didn’t bother to look for any studies that confirm or deny what I’m saying. There may be some, although I doubt it. And yet you probably suspect that my statements from the previous paragraph are true because you thought about them and evaluated whether they were true. If I had included hyperlinks, you would probably have taken a shortcut and subconsciously decided that you didn’t need to evaluate my words because the existence of the hyperlink is itself a statement that says “this thing is true, I got it from a good source, here, I’ll show you”. That works even if you don’t click on the hyperlink. 

Again, I’m not citing a source for that claim. There are certainly plenty of findings in psychology that do support this claim (e.g., priming, confirmation bias, anchoring, cognitive load theory, mere exposure, authority bias). If you want, you can look for them and come to your own opinion. If I had given you a source, you probably wouldn’t click on it anyway. And if you did, you’d give it credibility that it doesn’t deserve.