Helping Writers Find the Right Words

Chris Pirillo — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 09:35:32 +0000

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Writers often need help in choosing words. This project is working to develop tools that will help writers by showing them some of the alternative ways by which they can express their ideas.

For writers, a thesaurus can be of help, but the results are often not relevant in the context intended. For common words, the list of suggestions can be very long, yet the right word never seems to be in the list.

Microsoft has a new solution This involves a huge thesaurus that has more than 1 million keywords and key phrases! The size makes it much more likely that you will find a great alternative for pretty much any word or phrase you can think of. The tool can even attempt to rewrite an entire sentence. It will look at all the combinations of words and phrases in your sentence, and suggest replacements for each of them.

The goal of this project isn’t to improve the work of professional writers. This is geared towards everyday writers like you and I… those of us writing emails, blog posts and even term papers for college.

Wouldn’t you like some assistance with finding just the right words?

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Helping Writers Find the Right Words

Are Punctuation, Usage, Grammar and Spelling Important?

Chris Pirillo — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 08:13:08 +0000

Are Punctuation, Usage, Grammar and Spelling Important?

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PUGS is my acronym for the words punctuation, usage, grammar and spelling. Just because I have a degree in English Education doesn’t mean everyone else does. If you have any trouble with any of these things, there is a website that can help you. All of these things, in relation to the way you communicate online, are important. If you don’t have a firm grasp on any of these, how do you expect to be taken seriously? Imagine, you get an email from someone who sounds like a third-grader. You can’t help but wondering how that person got hired. That’s how people look at others who cannot communicate well in written form. Luckily, there is Spellcheck ready to help.

Spellchecker is an online spelling, grammar and thesaurus tool. It’s so simple, a third-grader would actually be able to use it, and benefit from it. Simply type or paste your text into the box, and click the “Spell Check” button. A new box will pop open with your words inside. You can now choose from one of three options: Spellcheck, Grammar and Thesaurus. The Spellcheck tab will highlight in bold red any words that you have spelled incorrectly. There will be an area under your text showing suggested replacements for the wrongly spelled word.

The next tab is the Grammar tab. Once you click on that, anything they consider to be improper use of grammar will be highlighted with blue underlined text. Again, there will be suggested replacements underneath. Clicking the Thesaurus tab will again highlight you in blue underlined words, and give you suggestions for other words you can use instead. That is very helpful, and makes it much faster to determine when you’re using any particular word too much.

The next time you write for your job, your blog, or even in an email… consider using Spellcheck.

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Are Punctuation, Usage, Grammar and Spelling Important?

Chris Pirillo » thesaurus

Helping Writers Find the Right Words

Are Punctuation, Usage, Grammar and Spelling Important?