Academic Summary

"Writing for the World: Wikipedia as an Introduction to Academic Writing” by Christine Tardy

Academic Summary

In the article ‘Writing for the world: Wikipedia as an introduction to Academic Writing’, Tardy (2010) depicts a line of action to introduce  second language (L2) higher education learners into the world of academic writing. Tardy (2010)  states that in order to be successful in academic writing students need to have certain skills when they resort to outside sources, such as conducting research, evaluating validity of the sources, summarizing, paraphrasing, citing sources, adopting genre conventions and selecting proper lexis and grammar structures.

The article presents a model in which writers move through the process of composing an article for the web-based encyclopaedia site known as Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). The article delineates steps for carrying out a Wikipedia research project after describing the main features of the electronic devise. Before delving into this plan, Tardy (2010) makes clear what the website is in nature defining it as “one of the most well-known online encyclopaedia that includes […] over 12 million articles” (p. 13). Then, the eight different steps are clearly developed. In the first one the students must get to know the website and its characteristics focusing on the features of the articles included here. Once this is finished, the second step can be addressed. Students are supposed to have selected a topic so they are going to gather relevant information for their future article. In the third stage, data should be organised in the form of an outline including the corresponding sources. Later, in the fourth face, all the ideas included in the outline will be developed into full sentences that will be part of a coherent text. To go on, peers’ collaboration will be valuable as they are going to revise each other’s articles as part of the fifth point. The next phase, sixth, is to be considered one of the most important as plagiarism will be avoided citing correspondingly all the sources used along the article. Before jumping into the last –eighth- step in which students will publish their articles, careful and detailed “proofreading and polishing” (p.17) must be carried out. This is then part of the seventh phase.

To conclude, Tardy (2010) supports that the project above clearly explained is a good way to start walking the challenging but enriching path of academic writing developing literacy skills. She also affirms that this kind of research projects are accurate for students in different levels as they learn to perform within a context, respecting rules and answering to expected procedures, "Students can explore topics that interest them, while drawing on their multilingual resources and cultural experiences to write from a knowledgeable position" (Tardy, 2010, p. 18).

References

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