Overall, there is general agreement that the statistics derived from corpora show people what language they should learn and use – provided, of course, that these corpora contain accurate language. The field of language learning and teaching also makes great use of corpus linguistics (Aijmer, 2009 St.John, 2001).The most widely used sources are perhaps the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000) and the Phrase List (Martinez & Schmitt, 2012), both providing learners of English with the most frequently used (academic) words and phrases in the English language. more or less) in British and American English. For example, you can use the two freely accessible British National Corpus ( ) and Corpus of Contemporary American English ( ) to analyse how a word or chunk might be used differently (e.g. The field of corpus linguistics uses such databases (or ‘corpora’) to analyse language systematically. The idea of using a large language database to extract information is not new. This way, Google can serve as an incredibly useful tool to help us in our (academic) writing. For example, if we are not sure if the correct form is ‘looking forward to seeing you’ or ‘looking forward to see you’, Google will tell us it might be better to use the first (148,000,000 versus 15,800,000 results). the more often our chunk is found on the Internet), the more ‘accepted’ it apparently is. The idea behind this approach is simple: The more results Google gives us (i.e. Google is known for their effective ability to scrape vast amounts of content from the web, providing Writefull with a wealth of resources to draw from.Have you ever done a Google search to check if your writing is correct? Many of us do it all the time – especially when writing in our second language. These include Google Books, indexed data from the Google search engine, academic papers spread across nine different languages provided by Google Scholar, and thousands of news sources culled from Google News. Writefull draws from a selection of Google databases to produce high-quality results. It uses a similarly crowdsourcing function to improve accuracy in both of these processes.Ī product like this - using compiled information to improve one's individual language - is naturally going to live or die on how accurate and robust their language libraries are. Writefull also offers spoken pronunciations for a wide selection of words and can translate a number of different languages into English. You can similarly select gaps in text and see what words are typically used to fill those spaces. Writefull can take a snippet of text, highlight a specific word in it, and provide you with the most commonly used synonyms in context. Sometimes we have a message we want to convey but we aren't quite pleased with the flow of the language. Writefull also provides users with context for how these phrases are most commonly used. If you're trying to decide between two different sentences or phrases, you can even select both and compare them against each other to determine which is the more popular turn of phrase. You can identify how often the segment of text you've selected is used in popular language, helping to prevent redundant speech. The tools at your disposal are pretty substantive. Writefull links to a variety of different language databases, crowdsourcing common language and literature to help you make sure your writing is more in line with standard notions of right and wrong. Writefull's methodology for helping writers is actually rather clever. That makes it a useful tool for everything from email composition to Word documents to reading comprehension. All you have to do is highlight the text you're concerned about, hit the shortcut, and automatically get the tools you need to evaluate it. Rather than operating as a full window-based application, Writefull is tied to a keyboard shortcut. The great thing about Writefull is that it can coordinate with whatever program you use to do your writing. Writefull lets you convey your message with confidence and without having to worry about dumbing down your language out of concerns that your grammar or context is incorrect. With its complicated and sometimes contradictory rules for spelling and grammar, conveying your point in an accurate and professional manner can be a challenge even for the most experienced writers. Overall Opinion: Whether you're a student working on a term paper, a professional writer, or just an individual looking to improve your writing, understanding the ins and outs of the English language is sometimes difficult.
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