Systems Essay:

Systems Essay:

There are many tools for international students to improve their writing; however, not many of these tools are known for students. Personally, the only tools I was familiar with and has used before were autocorrect in word and a free version of Grammarly. This semester in ESL class, we got introduced to concordance and the site “Corpus.bye.edu”. As an international student doing a graduate degree in United States, I did not have much confidence in academic writing in English before, but with the help of this class and this website, I have grown some confidence in writing. Below I would explain some of the ways concordance has helped me, and the ways this website could have been better.

This mechanism of this website is very interesting; corpus provides an unlimited collection of electronic texts and makes it possible for users to check their compositions or sentences in this website for accuracy; it also checks the combination of words for frequency.

Composition mistakes are inevitable when writing in English, especially if English is not ones' first language. Before working with corpus, I had the habit of using a set of my familiar structures and sentences in almost every writing, and I never had the courage to try new compositions. So one way corpus has helped me, is that it has given me confidence to try new words and sentences with knowing the correct way to use them.

            I have recently found out that corpus can be helpful in not only enhancing the writing for my English class, but also for writing my thesis. There is an option in corpus in which researchers can create their own line of corpus; meaning that by adding the relative articles to their research in a folder, they can create a corpus of relevant articles written by experts in their major and then compare their writing to the conventional writing methods and vocabulary in those papers. I have not used this option till now, I have to confess I tried to use it for the sake of this article, but I was not familiar with instructions on how to create my library.

Although corpus is a great website with so many great tools, I do not think it is user-friendly. The only tool I found easy to use in corpus was concordance, and that is what has been helpful for me the most. I assume corpus developers needs to redesign and reconsider their website and create better instruction to use it. The interface of the website is somewhat confusing and needs to change in order to be compatible with young users taste. It would also be great if corpus designers could create a plugin for word, so that the user could write in word and check the concordance in the same time.

            In conclusion, concordance in corpus website has helped me in my writing and has given me confidence to use new words and compositions; it also has helped me to eliminate less frequent compositions from my writing. Whilst I found concordance the most helpful tool in corpus website, as I mentioned before I could not work with the other tools in corpus. In my opinion, corpus can be a much stronger tool if it initiates a change in its interface and redesigns its’ tools to provide a user-friendly experience. (Sahar)