- Return to the original article: How to satisfy Criterion 1a
- "Redundancy exercises"
- "Exercises in paragraphs, sentences and lists"
- "Know your Manual of Style"
- "Advanced editing exercises"
UNDER CONSTRUCTION. IT'S IN A MESS. DO NOT USE YET Non-native speakers: the English Wikipedia needs YOU. Globally, non-native speakers of English far outnumber the natives, and hold a vast repository of information that can enrich the English Wikipedia. In many cases, it's different information from what natives are likely to know. But you probably already know that English is obsessed with sets and subsets, and to write proper English, you need to be able to use the grammatical "articles": "the" and "a" (and what we call "article blank") to experess sets and subsets – for just about every noun you use. "Articles" in the grammatical sense are quite different from the "articles" you edit on Wikipedia.
There are three ways you will benefit from learning how to use these pesky little words correctly:
- readers and listeners will no longer need to make an effort to understand you, even if they have partially adapted;
- getting sets and subsets right will pay huge dividends in all walks of life where you use English.
The horrible truth is that each noun will require you to ask three basic questions about it. At first, these questions will take time, but as you become more practised, you'll automatise this task; eventually, you won't even have to think about it. This page will set you on a course to such ease of use by providing exercises to help you to acquire the appropriate skills. The three questions are:
- What is the basic context (set or subset)?
- Is the noun "countable", and is it singular or plural?
- Does the noun have special rules for articles?
We start with the first question, which is conceptually the most difficult.