English Dictionary, Thesaurus, And Word Finder Software. Get WordWeb to look up words in any program; also links to Wikipedia
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Three of the most popular dictionaries are Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Webster’s New World College Dictionary, and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary is preferred by two our primary style guides:
- Collocation. One thing that can make student writing sound awkward is an odd choice of collocation. Sometimes a choice that would be fine in everyday English or spoken academic contexts, such as do research stands out as too informal in academic writing, where conduct or undertake research might fit better.
- Dependent prepositions. A wrong choice of preposition may seem like a trivial error, and in speech it will usually be overlooked. But in academic discourse, where precision is highly valued, frequent minor errors can give the impression of intellectual sloppiness and inaccuracy.
- Following constructions. You can do a similar thing with the constructions that typically follow particular words (focus on doing, demonstrate how/what …).
- Parts of speech. EAP students need to develop a particular dexterity in swapping between parts of speech, whether they’re trying to find an appropriate paraphrase or construct a complex noun phrase.
Dec 7, 2015 · This series includes posts for researchers, especially non-native English researchers, who wish to understand how they can use English dictionaries to improve their scientific writing. You will find tips on how to select the correct dictionary and use it optimally.
- Yateendra Joshi
- 2015
Examples of dictionaries that are especially suited to writing English are the Longman Language Activator (LLA) and the Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English (OCDSE). The LLA is a monolingual dictionary (English) which is structured around frequent headwords that can be seen to correspond to reasonably common concepts.
Dec 2, 2014 · This series includes posts for researchers, especially non-native English researchers, who wish to understand how they can use English dictionaries to improve their scientific writing. You will find tips on how to select the correct dictionary and use it optimally.
- Yateendra Joshi
- 2014
Use it as a guide for learning, sure - but not as a guide for writing papers. The OED is the English dictionary to use. Other dictionaries are probably fine in all but the weirdest corner cases, but it helps to have some standardization.
In this video, I’ll explain when you should use a paper dictionary, an online dictionary, or no dictionary at all! I’ll show how to use your dictionary, and answer the question “which dictionary should I use?”.
