Online tools to improve

writing
Carla Demicheli
The awesomeness of internet!

Everybody knows that the Internet is full of

information and tools that may help you
with EVERYTHING.

In this presentation we will see what tools

can be used to help you in your writing
process
 General Dictionaries
There are several dictionaries online that can and
should be used here is a list of my favorite ones:

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/pt/

http://www.dictionary.com/

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/

http://www.merriam-webster.com/

http://www.macmillandictionary.com/
 Thesaurus
You know when you are writing and the
word that you think of is too simple or you
have repeated it many times? There is an
online tool to help you with that.

They are called thesaurus and are real

treasures for writing. There, you can find
synonyms and antonyms of words.
 Oxford collocation Dictionary

What is a collocation?

How to know if you are using

a combination of words
correctly?
 Google translator

When you need to find a

correspondence between
Portuguese and any foreign
language we instantly think
about Google Translator. But
why is it a problem?
A good option: linguee or other bilingual dictionaries
You can always use a bilingual
dictionary or use linguee that works
similarly to a dictionary but has its
bases on a corpus of articles that
were translated.

http://www.linguee.com.br/
 The Owl At purdue

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/

Is a writing lab from Purdue university that

helps with citations and other tools
 Youtube
There are several
channels on youtube
that may help with your
writing skills or any
other areas you want to
improve.

Macmillan has a
channel that can help
you out as well.
 Google docs
If you need to write from
anywhere you are, or if your
computer constantly makes
your files disappear, Google
docs is an excellent tool to
help you not only with
writing but with
presentations, charts etc...
 What can i do with google drive?
You can save your existing files

Create:

-Presentations

-Forms

-Writing files

-Spreadsheets

-Folders
 Google docs add-ons (complementos)
Google docs has many add-ons
(complementos) that may help
you with your academic life.

Every different program will

have different add ons.

Here are some useful ones for

writing.
 Word Counter
Every student who has taken a proficiency
exam knows the struggle to count words.
When writing on the computer you can use
word or this online tool.

Besides counting words, there is a variety of

other things you can do with your writing.
Even see what is your writing level.

https://wordcounter.net/
Writing source: http://www.flo-joe.co.uk/fce/students/writing/makeover/makeover5.htm
 Flo-Joe

Flo-joe is one of the websites that

may help you preparing for an
exam. You can easily find others on
google by just typing TOEFL IBT
exam preparation.
 Online corpora
The definition of corpus is:

Corpus is a large collection of texts. It is a body of written or spoken material upon which a linguistic
analysis is based. The plural form of corpus is corpora. Some popular corpora are British National
Corpus (BNC), COBUILD/Birmingham Corpus, IBM/Lancaster Spoken English Corpus. Monolingual
corpora represent only one language while bilingual corpora represent two languages. European Corpus
Initiative (ECI) corpus is multilingual having 98 million words in Turkish, Japenese, Russian, Chinese,
and other languages. The corpus may be composed of written language, spoken language or both.
Spoken corpus is usually in the form of audio recordings. A corpus may be open or closed. An open
corpus is one which does not claim to contain all data from a specific area while a closed corpus does
claim to contain all or nearly all data from a particular field. Historical corpora, for example, are closed
as there can be no further input to an area.
Examples of corpora

http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/

http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
Hands On! Activity With Coca Corpus

Please type on google Coca

Corpus and register.

After, type the link below and

in pairs do the 2 tasks.