An Academic Summary of a Research Article
In the article “Writing for the world: Wikipedia as an
introduction to Academic Writing” Tardy (2010) stated “As students move
from writing formal academic in English they face several challenges and writing
tasks in higher education often require students to draw upon outside sources
and to adopt the styles and genres of academic discourse” (p. 12). The purpose
of her article is to describe an approach to present the academic literacy
skills through an article which was designed for the web-based encyclopedia
site, Wikipedia.
At
the beginning of her article, the author provided a general definition about
Wikipedia. In this sense, she affirmed “Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that
includes 262 different language editions and over 12 million articles” (Tardy, 2010, p. 13).
She also added a description of its participants and an analysis
of the positive and the negative reputation of this online encyclopedia is also
included.
In addition, Tardy
(2010) explained that her students were asked to write their own Wikipedia
article and that its main aim was to publish them on the website for a worldwide
audience. In order to accomplish this goal, they needed to respect several
requirements as regards reliability of the sources, length and the final
publication.
Moreover, a
specific action plan is presented for the reader to understand how the
assignment was performed. The first step was to examine Wikipedia as regards how
it works and its content. The second one was to analyze the information
according to categories such as events, products or objects and genres which
were studied according to the principles of genre-based pedagogy (Hyland,
2007). The third and forth steps were described as outlining, paraphrasing and
drafting in order to avoid plagiarism.
Furthermore,
students received feedback from their peers. The following step was to format
sources according to the use of in-text citations and footnotes. After that,
students focused on proofreading to polish their drafts. Finally, students
registered, tried to publish their assignments and the administrators would ask
for revision or just accept their writings.
All in all, Tardy
(2010) concluded her article emphasizing the fact that this kind of academic
writing presents such a challenge for students that they can explore concepts
as drawing on multilingual resources and cultural experiences for a worldwide
audience.
References
Tardy, C. M. (2010). Writing for the world:
Wikipedia as an introduction to Academic Writing. English Teaching Forum,
1, pp. 12-19, 27.
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