Researchers write for research. We write proposals to compete for grants. We write notebooks to organize our ideas. We write papers to publish in journals. But we are no professional writers. We are trained to review literature. We are trained to reason logically. We are trained to plan and exexute experiments. We are trained to do mathematics and run computer simulations. Writing is just not one of our expertises. So what can we do to improve the quality of our writing? Here are some tools that I use to improve my writing.

Dictionaries and thesaruses

A dictionary is important when you want to check the exact meaning of a word and to ensure that you’re not writing nonsense. They also provide a few example sentences for you to understand how the words should be used.

A thesarus is also important. You can find words with identical or opposite meaning (synonym and antonym) in a thesarus. If you have used a word for too many times and the paragraph has become too boring to read, you may want to use a thesarus to look up its synonym and use it. Likewise, if you want to find a word which meaning is the opposite of another word, you can do so with a thesarus. While dictionaries anre thesaruses used to be separate books, online websites at present combine the two together pretty well, and you don’t need to keep looking up words in two books for the correct usage of a word!

American English

Merriam-Webster Dictionary provides the meaning of lots of words in details. It also provides good example sentences for you to understand how the word should be used.

The American Heritage Dictionary provides simple defintions of words. It does not have so many example sentenes as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, but some entries contains usage notes that help you to distinguish words with very similar meaning. You can take a look at an example on the difference between besides and beside here.

British English

Oxford Dictionary provides the meaning of a lot of words in British English. While its function is similar to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, you may need to switch between the two dictionaries depending on whom you are writing to.

Collocation

Word combinations (collocation) are also important in writing. If you use two words together incorrectly, nobody would know what you’re saying. But how can one know if two words can be together?

English Language & Usage Stack Exchange and English Language Learners Stack Exchange are two good websites from Stack Exchange which provides a lot of Q&As for collocations. One of their advantages is that you don’t need to go to their websites to look for their content. If you google the pharase under question, the related Q&A sessions usually pop up in your search results. However, the quality of the answers is heavily dependent on the replies, and sometimes they may even generate more questions than answers.

JustTheWord finds out appopriate combinations of words by conducting analysis and statistics over a corpus called British National Corpus. After you enter a word to the website, it gives you a list of collocations related to the word for you to examine. How is it used as an object with other words? How about its uses with other words as a verb? It’s easy to use and can even provide more example sentences of a word than a dictionary. However, it is inflexible. You cannot enter more than one keyword for the search or it fails. Also, if its results do not provide the collocations that you need, you can seldom adjust the search for better results.

Linggle also works similarly as JustTheWord with more powerful functions to specify whether you need nouns, verbs or other parts of speech after the word in question. It also allows you to specify placeholders in your search inquiry. However, it doesn’t specify what corpus is being used for the results. It also provides much fewer example sentences than JustTheWord. So you should use it with a dictionary to ensure that it’s results are correct.

BNCweb provides similar functions as Linggle. While the learning curve of its search query format is steep, once you have mastered it, you can find collocations with many words. You can also create your own analytic methods by using the frequency breakdown and sorting functions of the searched collocations.

Readability

Sometimes, you may accidentally use words that are too difficult for your readers. For example, after writing a journal paper, when you need to write a report for the general public, you may accidentally use words like “probability distribution function” or “two-phase fluid” which are not known by people outside your research area. To ensure that others can understand your writing, you may want to use simpler words and phrases. But how does one know if their words are simple enough?

Lextutor VocabProfile provides a tool which can rank the words in your essay according to their difficulties. By reading the results of the analysis, you would know which words may be too difficult for others and should be simplified.