So much for being original…

Inside Higher Ed published a news piece today on Wikipedia in the classroom titled “When Wikipedia Is the Assignment.” In case you haven’t seen them, I wrote Simple English Wikipedia for ESL/EFL Students Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 for students studying on their own and Add Some Spice to Writing Class With Simple English Wikipedia for teachers because I hadn’t seen anyone advocating students writing for Simple English Wikipedia.

I was on UsingEnglish.com when I saw a forum post from a student asking for help finding a word that rhymed with ‘hurt.’The first thing I did was think up a few words that might help, but then I started thinking that there must be a better way of finding rhyming words.

I am not a programmer, but I do know a little about programming and there is a very easy way to match parts of words in most programming languages. Regular expression let you substitute parts of words with wildcard characters. It is very easy to program a feature that lets you match just the ending of a word to find possible rhyming matches. So I decided to look for an online dictionary that lets you find words that end with the same sequence of letters.

I would like now to follow up on my Simple English Wikipedia for ESL/EFL Students series with a few ideas for using Simple English Wikipedia in your writing class.

I am presuming that you have read my Simple English Wikipedia for ESL/EFL series. If you haven’t, you might want to check it out, particularly Part 3 and Part 4 that are concerned specifically with writing.

I answered the question: What is Simple English Wikipedia? in Part 1. In Part 2, I shared a couple of basic things you can do to study English on Simple English Wikipedia. And in Part 3, I wrote about why it is okay for English students to write for Simple English Wikipedia. Now, in this Part 4, I will help answer the question: How should I write for Simple English Wikipedia?

When writing a Simple English Wikipedia article, the first paragraph is the most important. It gives you all the most basic information about the subject. Lets look at a few examples from Simple English Wikipedia from the “very good article” category. When you are reading these pay particular attention to the first sentence.