Becoming Academic Writers Using Wikipedia: An Academic Summary of Tardy’s (2010) article

The article Writing for the World: Wikipedia as an Introduction to Academic Writing (Tardy, 2010) depicts the usefulness of utilizing the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to help second language (L2) students to become academic writers. Tardy (2010) describes the process to compose an article for students to gain master literacy skills while writing an article for the online resource focusing on a real audience. 

To write a formal text, learners need to be acquainted with some specific knowledge of the academic genre. Tardy (2010) states that “it is useful to begin by finding out what students … know” (p.14). After sharing Wikipedia articles and analyzing their common features, students can be conducted on the procedures of outlining and paraphrasing, formatting sources, checking grammar, and publishing their works, applying Wikipedia conventions.

According to Tardy (2010), “the Wikipedia-writing project described [in the text] introduces students to many skills of academic research writing in a manageable and interested way” (p. 18). As learners are aware that the page is available for everyone to post and edit any text and that it reaches masses all over the world, they may feel enthusiastic for having the chance to publish for a worldwide audience. Moreover, they “enjoy the satisfaction of seeing their work published on a high-traffic global website” (Tardy, 2010. p. 18).

On the whole, although academic writing posts lots of challenges to L2 students, by exploiting Wikipedia, they can discover many of the skills needed to write a coherent text while working with a well-known source and for a real public.  By considering Tardy’s practical step-by-step guide, students will improve their academic skills so as to become members of the academic writing community.

Reference

Tardy, C. M. (2010). Writing for the world: Wikipedia as an introduction to Academic Writing. English Teaching Forum, 1, pp. 12-19, 27. Retrieved from http://exchanges.state.gov/englishteaching/forum/archives/docs/10-48-1-c.pdf