There are two separate reasons for referencing your work.
One is fairness: i.e. avoiding passing someone else’s work off as your own (here, it may be useful to think in terms of do as you would be done by).
The other is to do with academic method, that is, you present a reliable source for your information to demonstrate that it is not just assertion.
Reliable Source and this Blog
By correct academic standards, this blog is not a reliable source. It is a self-published compilation of reflections, of greatly varying academic rigor, and has not been put through any sort of quality control such as peer review.
However, as far as philosophy and theology go, I do have a relevant qualification.
If you have nothing better, and your academic institution allows personal communication (for example, lecture notes), it may be possible to reference some things on this blog directly to my qualifications.
This amounts to saying, “so-and-so said this and they have some knowledge of what they are talking about.” It’s not brilliant, but it can be better than nothing in some circumstances.
In this specific case, the correct information for a reference (which you should format consistently into whatever style is being used) is “[specific web address of relevant page on blog], Miss Cherry J. Foster, B.A. Philosophy and the Catholic Tradition, Maryvale Institute, (validated: Open University, UK) 2018.
I strongly advise checking with your referencing guide or tutor as to whether or not this is a good idea, as it is likely to vary by institution and level, whether they will indeed say, “Better than no reference at all,” or “Violation of scholarly conventions in citing non-academic reference”.
This is also something where it matters how much you do it. Occasional use of non-academic sources – e.g. 3 references out of 60 – is unlikely to reflect much on the reliability of the argument. However, if 20 out of 25 references are not to reliable academic sources, most of what has been said is unsubstantiated.
Finally, if I have said something such as, “according to Aristotle,” in a post and not given a proper reference, feel totally free to ask me for the correct reference (though also be aware, that as I am in poor health, I may not always be able to do it quickly).
Plagiarism
If you actually got the idea which you wish to use from this blog, then it is necessary to reference it for the sake of fair play.
However, I do still add a caution. Universities are, in my opinion, often inconsistent in their referencing instructions, in that they want to imply that they will boil students alive for not referencing someone else’s ideas, and yet they simultaneously issue instructions that exclude references to many real sources of ideas, on the basis that these sources are non-academic.
I hope this quandary will not last: it is a confusion which goes with the territory of the two separate reasons for referencing things (i.e. plagiarism and reliable sourcing), which do not actually work in the same way or require the same approach.
If you have this problem, and your institution is not clarifying usefully, I suggest referencing the blog to my qualifications as stated above (bold paragraph in “reliable source”), and then adding a note in brackets to the effect of: N.B.: this is the non-academic source from which I took this idea.
That way, you have both referenced the source and made it clear to whoever marks your work, that you comprehend the nature of the source and what it can and cannot be used for.
As always, check your own style guides and, if at all possible, with your tutor!
Good luck in all your academic endeavours! 🙂
Cherry Foster
Handmaid's Distaff 