All the News Without all the Frippery

Mark Johnson, Education Director for adult learning at the Wisconsin Technical College System, sent us an email about a news resource. 

The New York Times has just issued The Times in Plain English.  Readers of the Times are mostly college graduates.  This new initiative is designed to reach lower level readers or "basic readers" as well.  It presents major news stories without using any complex or compound sentences, and uses no metaphors, similes, or analogies.  It avoids slang and idiomatic words, contractions, and adjectives, and adopts other standards to make material easier and more readable.  Each story is short and to the point...The online newspaper is available at no cost and may be reproduced and distributed by teachers, students, and other adults at will.   

Screen capture from The Times in Plain English, August 6

On-line newspapers for beginning readers have been around for a while now, but the Times has a lot of promise. Backed up by the best known newspaper in the country, if not the world, it will likely last when other on-line papers have gone under. Please bookmark this link: http://www.thetimesinplainenglish.com/wp/.  It is also linked at Literacy Network's Delicious.com website, www.delicious.com/literacy_network. Good reading to you all, and thank you for being a tutor.