Academic Summary of an Article

In her article “Writing for the World: Wikipedia as an Introduction to Academic Writing”, Tardy (2010) shows how writing an article for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) can help second language (L2) writers acquire academic writing skills. She mentions some of the challenges that students face while learning to write academic papers in English, explains why writing for Wikipedia can be useful in an academic writing class, and describes her approach to introduce academic literacy skills by getting students to participate in a project that involves them in the production of an article for Wikipedia. She also describes the necessary steps to carry out such a project.

Among the challenges that students face when learning to write in academic contexts, Tardy (2010) mentions that students  are required to “conduct research, summarize and paraphrase, cite sources, adopt genre conventions that meet audience expectations,  and  select  words  and grammatical  patterns  that  are  characteristic  of  less  personal  and  more formal genres of writing” (p. 12)

Tardy (2010) claims that Wikipedia is “an excellent forum for students to begin confronting the challenges of academic writing: research, citation of generic conventions, and style” (p. 13). She also explains that familiarizing students with Wikipedia and its publishing requirements also helps L2 students to become more aware of “the credibility and reliability of information” (Tardy, 2010, p.13) that they may find in Wikipedia.

In the project that Tardy (2010) describes, students produce Wikipedia articles with the purpose of publishing them on Wikipedia, thus making those articles visible to a global audience. In order to comply with Wikipedia’s demand that “information be supported by reliable sources” (p. 14) learners need to carry out research on what they want to write about, and while doing so, they will have to find credible sources. As Wikipedia also expects that the information should be “supported by footnotes and general references, which require students to engage in correct citation practices” (Tardy, 2010, p. 14), learners need to learn how to cite sources appropriately.

Tardy (2010) also mentions and explains the necessary steps in the process of composing an article for Wikipedia. These include getting students to examine and understand Wikipedia and its conventions, asking students to get information about the topics they can write about, doing research, getting students to produce an outline for their articles -thus planning what content they are going to include and how to organize it-, writing a draft, peer editing, citing sources according to Wikipedia conventions, proofreading and final editing, and publishing.

In conclusion, Tardy (2010) claims that carrying out a project that involves students in the production and publishing of an article on Wikipedia can help L2 writers acquire the necessary academic literacy skills they need in order to write appropriately in academic contexts. In her article, she explains the reasons why such a project can be useful with L2 writers and the steps that are involved in the process.

 References

Tardy, C. M. (2010).Writing for the world: Wikipedia as an introduction to Academic Writing. English Teaching Forum, 1, pp. 12-19, 27