System concordance

I have been studying in English as a second language for couple of years, but writing errors occur frequently because of lack of examples from the environment. Fortunately, various tools help me a lot when struggling in academic writing. They have advantages in efficiency, convenience and comprehension. Here, I introduce three tools, BYU Corpus, Microsoft spelling and grammar checker, and Thesaurus.com, to show how these tools help me while writing.

First, BYU corpus can notify me of differences between similar phases. For example, I am always confused about the use of ‘compare’ in a sentence, and I want to find out the differences between ‘compare to (W1)’ and ‘compare with (W2)’. When I typed these two phases into the BYU corpus website, it listed a table which contained the frequency of each word and the ratio of twos phases showing up in sentences. It’s surprising to find that the appearance ratio of W1/W2 is 1.86, which means ‘compare to’ is more popular than ‘compare with’. However, when we check the attached samples, we can find out both have different functions in sentences. People usually use ‘compare to’ to asset two alike things and use ‘compare with’ to figure out differences and similarities.

Secondly, Microsoft office provides me instant feedback to correct spelling and grammar mistakes simultaneously. Even when I was writing this essay, it was hard for me to spell long words such as ‘simultaneous’. Luckily, the Microsoft Word 2016 would mark the spelling errors with a squiggly line in red and grammar issues in blue. I don’t do anything to find out about such errors while working. Meanwhile, checker doesn't work if person’s or brand’s name, URL link and abbreviation appears. It’s interesting to find out that passive voice would be recognized as a grammar issue frequently. Anyway, Microsoft checker is one of the most helpful tools for writing.

Thirdly, Thesaurus.com is useful when I want to know the definition and synonyms of an unfamiliar word. As Election night falls, a haunting word, ‘polls’, arouse my attention. When I searched it on Thesaurus, I noticed that mostly the definition of polls is the place where votes are taken. We can consider polls as the numerical result of the voting or of collecting opinions. It’s a better way to grasp this word by referring to its synonyms which are commonly used. For example, the synonyms for ‘polls’ are ‘ballot’, ‘vote’, ‘voting’, and ‘opinion’. I’ll write ‘polls’ to express America’s voting for the next time.

With an attempt to make sense of the linguistic universe and realize concordance of writing system, it’s helpful for us second language learner to use writing tools to get feedback in time when you are potentially wrong.(Tianyu)