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Wow ....these nytimes Infographics guys are good

ESL Tools & Practices For Better Writing In English As A Second Language

Aug. 30th, 2009 By Eyal Sela

Writing in a foreign language (in this case, English) can be quite difficult, and mistakes are easy to make. These range from misspelled and missing words to grammatical errors and incorrect sentences. Sometimes you can make a mistake and not even know about it!

This post offers ESL tools and practices based on real life experience that will help significantly improve your written English.

On-the-fly misspelling correction

TinySpell is a little software that detects spelling errors as you type (compared to spellcheckers that requires you to manually check the text). It is a great addition to the built-in spellchecker in your text editor, since it allows you to correct misspelled words without taking your hands off the keyboard.

Another advantage is that it reduces the need to search for the right spelling of words that the built-in spellchecker couldn’t correct.

Are you using the right word?

But a spellchecker won’t tell you if you chose the right word and surely won’t help if you’re having a problem finding the right one to use.

For these cases you should download and install the WordWeb dictionary as an ESL tool. Use it to find synonyms or make sure the meaning of the word which you chose. For example, if you’re in doubt whether to use ‘then’ or ‘than’, you can check their definition within a single click, without even leaving the application you’re in.

You can also use the online English-English dictionary YourDictionary as an ESL tool to learn the right way to use a word. Just search for that word and then click the ‘Sentence examples‘ tab. There you will find examples of use in sentences (see image below).

If you know the word in your native language but not in English, use an online dictionary such as WordReference to translate it. If your language does not show up in WordReference, use Google to find one in which it does and save it to your bookmarks for future use.

Find the right word in a given context & make sure the sentence is correct.

When you’re not sure if a sentence is correct, or can’t remember how a phrase goes, use Google as an ESL tool. Often it’s enough just to copy and paste the sentence or a part of into Google to get the rest of it or to see how others have written it differently.

For example, if you search for ‘it is not over until‘, the first results will tell you that the rest of the sentence is ‘until the fat lady sings” (see image below).

When the sentence you’re writing isn’t that trivial, you have to be more specific for Google to help. Copy the sentence and paste it into Google enclosed in double quotation marks. The search will return only the exact sentence. If it shows up in high frequency, it is likely to assume that it is correct.

If you’re not sure about certain words within the sentence, replace them with an asterisk (*). That tells Google that ’something should be here, but I don’t know what’. The search results will contain variations of the sentence, from which you could learn the right way to write it.

For example, searching for this query: “paste it * google” (including the quotation marks) would have taught you to write “paste it into google” rather then “paste it to google”.

Problematic sentences & paragraphs

You’re over with the spelling and missing words. But did you compose the sentences correctly? Did you choose the right words? The people over at UsingEnglish, the English language discussion forums, will be glad to help you.

Just write the sentence or paragraph you’re not sure about, and you’ll get an answer within a few minutes or hours. Another possibility is to ask Aardvark for an opinion about the sentence – it has been working great for me.

Full text grammar check

Spellchecker is an online spelling, grammar, and thesaurus checker. Having accomplished the previous steps, you will probably not need to use the spelling feature spellchker offers.

The grammar checking, on the other hand, is very useful and worth going through. It detects mistakes such as sentences that do not begin with a capital letter; correct grammar mistakes such as “to” vs. “too”, and warn you from being too wordy.

Find the unfindable mistakes

The final step is to use Google translate. The secret here is to use it in reverse. That is, take the finished text in English and translate it into your native language. This step takes a lot of time, and surely there is no need to apply it always, but I find it crucial for important texts, such as blog posts I publish.

Reading the text in your native language enables you to detect mistakes you wouldn’t otherwise detect. For example, no spelling or grammar checker would correct the sentence “it seams like a bed idea to fill out this from” (where “seams”, “bed”, and “from” should have been “seem”, bad” and “form”, respectively). You wouldn’t even know the mistakes are there to ask for help, but in the translated version this sentence would just not make any sense.

What are your tools and practices for better English?  Tell us in the comments.

Image Credits : Håkan Dahlström

More about: education, english, esl, grammar, practice View all tags

(By) Eyal Sela (@eyalsela), author of ProductiveWise, the productivity, social media, and Internet blog.

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1 Comment Add Comment

2009-08-30 21:26:34

Joao Brito

Great advice. Thanks a lot. I already use Google the way you mentioned, but the tip for using asterisks, for instance, to find out the right preposition, is invaluable.

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Awesome article on a guy who thinks differently

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison says he wants to keep Sun's hardware business, but he might be bluffing. Photo: Oracle

Could the Sun still come out at HP?

It’s no secret that Larry Ellison wanted Sun Microsystems (JAVA) for its software, not its servers. Regulatory filings show that before the hard-charging Oracle (ORCL) CEO put together his successful $5.6 billion offer and outbid IBM (IBM) for Sun in April, another party was kicking the tires as well.

One of the worst kept secrets in Silicon Valley is, that someone was Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Mark Hurd.

Since then, though, Ellison has said that he intends to keep all of Sun for himself.

But maybe he doesn’t. A person with knowledge of the communication between Oracle and HP suggested to me recently that Oracle still might deal those hardware assets to HP. And you know what? It could be a fine idea for both of them.

Why would Ellison want to give up Sun’s hardware? Actually, he never wanted it in the first place. Oracle’s first offer to Sun was for just the software business, regulatory filings show. Oracle is a software company after all, and while it certainly has the wherewithal to transform itself into something else, it might not be worth the hassle – or the ding to its profit margins.

Ellison claims he plans to use Sun’s server business to build appliances that are custom-tuned to run Oracle applications – like a data center version of Apple’s strategy of marrying hardware and software. But what else is he supposed to say about hardware now that he’s stuck with it?

HP might actually want Sun’s hardware to boost its services business. HP became a services heavyweight when it bought outsourcing giant EDS last year, and a little-known fact is that at the time, EDS was Sun’s best customer. You can bet that EDS still buys plenty of Sun hardware – so by owning Sun technology, HP could probably goose the profit margins on many of its services deals.

More reasons a deal could happen: HP executives say the EDS integration process is going well, and they feel good about the health of the outsourcing business in general. Also, there are signs that the global economy is stabilizing, which should make HP’s brass in Palo Alto less queasy about parting with the cash.

There are also plenty of reasons the companies might not do a deal. The economy seems to be improving, but it’s still touch and go, and HP might not want to shell out for another fixer-upper. Or Oracle might genuinely want to keep the hardware business.

But don’t put too much stock in Ellison’s claim that he wants to own hardware. When it comes to mergers and acquisitions, you have to take Ellison’s proclamations with a grain of salt. As we saw when he maneuvered to buy PeopleSoft and BEA Systems, he’s willing to bluff to get what he wants.

In this case, Ellison might be bluffing to rid of something at a decent price.

could happen....

Best Trailer for 2009

nice info-graphic for Movie trivia

Nice Read

For 33 years, Peter A. Rona has pursued an ancient, elusive animal, repeatedly plunging down more than two miles to the muddy seabed of the North Atlantic to search out, and if possible, pry loose his quarry.

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The Stephen Low Company and Rutgers University

Light-equipped booms on Alvin illuminate the sea floor and pillow lava formations created by eruptions on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. More Photos »

Multimedia

Slide Show

The Hunt for a Living Fossil

Graphic

Peter A. Rona, a professor of marine geology and geophysics at Rutgers University, discovered a living fossil 30 years ago on the Atlantic Ocean floor along a volcanic rift. More Photos >

Like Ahab, he has failed time and again. Despite access to the world’s best equipment for deep exploration, he has always come back empty-handed, the creature eluding his grip.

The animal is no white whale. And Dr. Rona is no unhinged Captain Ahab, but rather a distinguished oceanographer at Rutgers University. And he has now succeeded in making an intellectual splash with a new research report, written with a team of a dozen colleagues.

They have gathered enough evidence to prove that his scientific prey — an organism a bit larger than a poker chip — represents one of the world’s oldest living fossils, perhaps the oldest. The ancestors of the creature, Paleodictyon nodosum, go back to the dawn of complex life. And the creature itself, known from fossils, was once thought to have gone extinct some 50 million years ago.

Has the long pursuit frustrated him? “No,” Dr. Rona replied as he displayed traces of the animal in sedimentary rocks some 50 million years old. “It’s science. It’s detective work. It’s about racking up one clue after another.”

Still, in an interview at Rutgers, Dr. Rona said he looked forward to eventually capturing one of the creatures alive. “I think it’s likely,” he said, “if we can do the dives.” Dr. Rona, an authority on the deep sea, likes nothing better than to cram himself into a tiny submersible and fall into the abyss.

It takes more than two hours to descend to the creature’s abode, which lies more than two miles down. The environmental stability of that world — including its crushing pressures and icy darkness — means that some of its most famous inhabitants have survived for eons as evolutionary throwbacks, their bodies undergoing little change. For instance, sea lilies, marine animals with feathery arms, date back more than 400 million years.

Dr. Rona has found that P. nodosum thrives in restricted areas of Atlantic seabed. Its only visible feature consists of tiny holes arranged in six-sided patterns that look curiously like the hearts of Chinese checkers boards. He has photographed thousands of the hexagons and found that large ones have 200 or 300 holes.

 

Nice Read check it out