Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Suggestions for ESL Writers

Grammar Gang in a post, "write like a native," gives three suggestions for ESL writers. The first one is to use Google as a resource for phrases that the writer is not sure about. The suggestion is to put the phrase in quotation marks and search for usage. They give the following two phrases as examples: "at the house of my mother" and "at my mother's house." The second suggestion is to use a thesaurus, which is a type of dictionary that contains synonyms for words. Teachers sometimes suggest careful use of a thesaurus, and I suggest using a thesaurus with a dictionary as a double check because English has so many words with multiple meanings.
The final suggestion is for writers to read their papers aloud to help the writer slow down and catch errors. The post is definitely worth reading and thinking about.